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S8TIE CHURCH'S LIFE 



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A STUDY OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF 
THE CHURCH'S MISSION 



BY 



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WM. C. STURGIS, A.M., Ph.D, 



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NEW YORK 
DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN MISSIONARY SOCIETY 

281 FOURTH AVENUE 
1920 




dass.OJ -LaAjS^ 



RESENTED BY 



THE CHURCH'S LIFE 

A STUDY OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF 
THE CHURCH'S MISSION 

BY 

WM. Go STURGIS, A.M., Ph.D. 



NEW YORK 
DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN MISSIONARY SOCIETY 

281 FOURTH AVENUE 
1920 



.527 



Gift 

Mrs. Ada Spinks 



PREFACE 

This book is the outcome of dire need on 
my part. When, in 1917, I accepted the posi- 
tion of Educational Secretary of the Board of 
Missions and began work as such, a very seri- 
ous difficulty at once presented itself. Al- 
though a lifelong Churchman, a member of 
the Board of Missions for nearly ttn years, 
and a leader of men's Bible classes for thirty, 
I had only the most rudimentary idea of what 
the Church exists for, what the word "mis- 
sions" means, and what is the teaching of the 
Scriptures on this subject. It was quite obvi- 
ous that if, as was necessary, I was at once 
to begin trying to make these matters clear to 
others, I must first clarify my own mind. For 
four months, sleeping and waking, I thought 
of little else; and then I became bold enough 
to prepare notes and to lead a Summer con- 
ference class on "The Fundamentals of the 
Church's Mission." Whether my students re- 
ceived anything of value is of little importance. 
I did. For three successive years I gave the 
same course, always once, sometimes twice, 
constantly expanding it under the stimulus of 
tht Holy Spirit's teaching, and the invaluable 
experience of being obliged to think logically 
and to express myself clearly. The attempt to 



Preface 

convince others is the only way to become con- 
vinced oneself; teaching is the only road to 
learning; one makes the best advance in com- 
pany. By this process my brief notes gradu- 
ally became sufficiently copious to form the 
basis of a volume; and as there seemed to be 
a need for such a book — judging at least by 
my own abysmal ignorance when I began — it 
seemed advisable to place them in that form, 
as a textbook for a study of the Church's mis- 
sion in the world. 

The book, I think, contains nothing new. 
Indeed he would be venturesome who dared 
imagine that he had discovered anything new 
upon this well-worn topic. Still, the point of 
view may, in some cases, be found to differ 
from that commonly occupied. I do not, for 
example, remember having seen in any book 
a statement of the objective of the Church's 
mission as being the transmission of life from 
those who have it to those who have it not. 
Certainly "missions," as commonly defined, fall 
far short of this, and hence do not appeal to 
the average layman. 

The reader at all acquainted with the subject 
will have no difficulty in tracing my constant 
indebtedness to certain notable books, espe- 
cially Dr. McLean's, Where the Book Speaks; 
Dr. Lawrence's, Introduction to the Study of 
Foreign Missions; and Bishop Gore's, The 
Sermon on the Mount. 

New York, August, 1920. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 



I. 


The Failure of a Nation. , . 


I 


II. 


A Chosen Generation 


25 


III. 


Life More Abundantly 

The Church and Physical Well- 


S3 




being 


64 




The Church and Education 


7i 


IV. 


The Model Missionary 


81 


V. 


The Great Charter of the Church 


no 


VI. 


The Call to Intelligence . 


13s 


VII. 


The Power in the Church 


168 



THE CHURCH'S LIFE 

CHAPTER I 

THE FAILURE OF A NATION 

However much there may be which the 
average layman can neither understand nor 
explain in religion — whether natural or re- 
vealed — one thing seems fairly obvious, i. e., 
that the whole story of both nature and revela- 
tion is, to any man who looks about him and 
reads his Bible, a record of God's eager desire 
to make Himself known to man and to make 
man able to learn at least something about 
God. 

Undoubtedly there are men — often even 
students of science — who are so inexpressibly 
dull or so hopelessly immersed in things which 
they can see and taste and smell, and which 
therefore they take to be real, that they can 
look up at the sky on a clear night of stars, or 
feel the out-poured vigor of the sun, or catch 
the odor of flowers fresh blown, or watch the 
ebb and flow of life in a microscopic cell, with- 
out a thought of the Power hidden behind the 

1 



The Church's Life 

mere things seen. But I imagine that the 
majority of men, on the rare occasions when 
they really think, get, from the varied aspects 
of nature, some inkling of law and order and 
beauty, and have occasional fleeting impres- 
sions that, hidden away behind material things, 
there is something spiritual which is trying 
with all its might to get a message across to 
them. Many go so far as to think of this 
"some thing" as "some One." The impression 
is vague and momentary ; it doesn't amount to 
much and it isn't of much use. But it repre- 
sents a distinct effort on God's part, and it 
would have a measure of success — has had, in- 
deed, in rare instances, marked success — if 
only the man would not immediately proceed to 
hide himself from God's search in a fog of in- 
difference or laziness, on the ground that, after 
all, we are "men in a world of men," that the 
daily struggle for subsistence is quite enough 
to engage all the faculties of a normal man, and 
that the bridge to any other life is to be crossed 
when we get there. The truth is that Natural 
Religion, as a revelation of God, may make its 
appeal to some men all the time and to all men 
some time, but, as an adequate expression of 
God's passionate desire to convey to man a mes- 
sage concerning Himself, it has proved a fail- 
ure. 

What is there left to be tried? What other 
means are possible ? If the heavens themselves 
fail to declare to men the glory of God; if men 

2 



The Failure of a Nation 

decline to see, in the ordered course of the 
firmament, any evidence of His handiwork; if 
sunshine and rain, the ordered seasons, the 
majesty of the sea, the infinite accuracy of 
created adjustments, give to the average man 
no thought of the wisdom and power and good- 
ness of God, how can God make Himself 
known? What avenue of approach can there 
possibly be between pure spirit and that seem- 
ingly indissoluble mixture of spirit and flesh 
which we know as Man? How can man, 
whether evolved from the beast or recovering 
from a lapse into beast-hood, rise to a point 
where he can see God for himself as not a 
stranger ? 

Faced by this dilemma God brought to light 
the greatest discovery of all time — that He 
could and must use man as the means for 
making Himself known to all mankind; in 
other words, that He must find some human 
being to whom He could reveal Himself, and 
who, in turn, could pass the knowledge on to 
others. The man so chosen must evidently 
possess two qualifications — first, he must have 
some unique spiritual capacity for receiving 
God ; secondly, he must value the revelation so 
highly as to make it his business to tell others. 

In the very early dawn of history such a 
man appears. Before Abraham's time, there 
appear to have been individual cases of men 
to whom God was able to make Himself known 
in some measure. But Abraham was the first 

3 



The Church's Life 

who, having 1 come to trust God, was willing to 
surrender his life, and to leave home and coun- 
try, "not knowing whither he went," in order 
to conserve, for the benefit of his race, the 
knowledge of God which he had received. He 
was already an old man, judged by our stand- 
ards; his knowledge of God was fragmentary 
and incomplete ; he probably had his eyes fixed 
quite as much on the temporal promises made 
to him as on the rather vague and long- 
deferred blessings predicted for his race; he 
was by no means perfect morally; but he had 
the one thing which God appears to deem es- 
sential in His messengers — a capacity for be- 
coming something worth while. 

Where the man came from is uncertain, ex- 
cept that it was somewhere in that wide region 
on the northern confines of Babylonia between 
the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and hence 
known to us as Mesopotamia. What his ante- 
cedents were we know only from a list of 
names. But one fact stands out prominently — 
he had received and cherished a true concep- 
tion of the unity and personality of God. 
Amid the polytheism and idolatry of Babylonia 
and Egypt, this was a unique revelation. It 
came to Abraham with an intensely personal 
meaning, so much so that later God, through 
the prophet Isaiah, speaks of "Abraham, my 
friend." This recognition of the oneness of 
God, this realization of God as a personal, 
guiding, trustworthy Presence, was what set 

4 



The Failure of a Nation 

Abraham apart from all who had preceded him, 
from his contemporaries, and from the tribes 
of Canaan among whom he eventually settled. 
And because God saw in Abraham a capacity 
for conserving this first successful attempt to 
reveal His essential nature to a man, and a 
further ability on Abraham's part to pass on 
this new-found knowledge to "his children and 
his household after him," in order that finally, 
through Abraham's descendants holding fast 
to this faith, its blessings should overflow to 
"all the families of the earth" — for these rea- 
sons God determined to separate this first mis- 
sionary of His from the contaminating sur- 
roundings of his own land and to plant him in 
a distant, restricted and isolated region which, 
after being purged of its idolatrous inhabitants, 
might become for Abraham and his countless 
descendants the fruitful seed-bed for further 
revelations, culminating in a complete and final 
revealing of Himself which should be man's 
salvation to all eternity. 

It was a plan in keeping with the all-seeing 
wisdom of God; but its success depended abso- 
lutely on man's cooperation. For God to reveal 
Himself to man is one thing — and always pos- 
sible. For God to force man to pass on the 
revelation to some one else is quite another 
thing — and always impossible so long as man 
retains his God-given freedom of will. So it 
was with Abraham's descendants. Selected, 
isolated, protected, disciplined, enlightened by 

5 



The Church's Life 

God Himself in order that they might become 
His missionaries — the bearers of His messages 
to the outside nations — the Jewish people saw 
in His promises merely a one-sided compact of 
which they were the beneficiaries, and in His 
protection only the flattering evidence that 
they were His chosen people because of their 
"righteousness." As a people they seem to 
have had no conception of the fact that if they 
were really a nation selected out of all the 
world, they had been so selected for a definite 
purpose in which all nations were included; or 
that if they had been given even a partial 
knowledge of God, it was with the sole object 
of their sharing that knowledge with the whole 
world. Their attitude of mind would appear 
incredible were it not that precisely the same 
mental attitude is characteristic of the Church 
today as represented by the average Christian. 
It is interesting to note how patiently God tried 
to make His nature more and more clear to 
this peculiarly dull-minded people, and how 
wise and practical were His methods. First, 
selecting one man in the person of Abraham, 
He promised him, in return for obedience to 
tha point of exile, a secure foothold on dearth 
and a multitude of descendants compacted into 
one nation which should be a blessing to the 
world. Between Abraham's immediate family 
He made a selection, rejecting Hagar and her 
son Ishmael as having no capacity for spiritual 
development (a selection justified in the Edo- 

6 



The Failure of a Nation 

mites and in the Midianites and the nomadic 
Arabs of today), and choosing Isaac as the 
vehicle of further revelation. Of Isaac's two 
sons God chose one, and rejected the other, 
again because of the fact, justified in the 
events, that Esau was distinctly commonplace 
and fit only to breed an earthy, unprogressive 
race; while Jacob, with all his glaring faults, 
did value spiritual things above material, and 
was fit to breed a race of God-servers. The 
revelation to Isaac is not on a much higher 
level than it had been to his father, neverthe- 
less so evident was it that he stood in a peculiar 
relation with God that even the Philistine 
chief, Abimelech, thought it the part of wisdom 
to be on friendly terms with one with whom 
God was plainly on friendly terms. 

With Jacob the revelation proceeds apace. 
The promises heard by him at Bethel are, it is 
true, still distinctly material; but the impres- 
sion made upon him in this vivid experience of 
God's presence, as also later at the ford of 
Jabbok, was a profound and lasting one, full 
of mysterious meaning but none the less real 
for that. To Jacob such an experience as the 
dream of a possible approach between heaven 
and earth — between God and man — through 
man — was a vision of what he — his people — the 
world- — might attain to through obedience to 
a divine friend. To Esau such an experience 
would have been merely a nightmare brought 
on by over-indulgence in bean-pottage. 

7 



The Church's Life 

In Jacob's large family of sons, some bet- 
ter, some worse, appears the first evidence of 
the fulfillment of God's promise to make of 
Abraham's descendants a great nation, in num- 
bers like the stars of heaven or the dust of 
the earth, mighty and numerous in order to be 
a spiritual force among the less developed peo- 
ples of the world. How these sons stand re- 
vealed in Jacob's final words to them! Insta- 
bility, ungoverned passions, materialism, sloth, 
falsity — such are the characteristics appearing 
in this extraordinary family. But among the 
twelve, two are found worthy of carrying on 
the destiny of the race of Israel. Through the 
obscure blessing pronounced on Judah — the 
lawgiver, the object of praise, the masterful — 
shine flashes of prophetic vision pointing to a 
far-off time when the nations shall be united 
in obedience to one divine authority. In the 
outpouring of blessings upon Joseph appear the 
compensating rewards attending persecution 
and suffering borne steadfastly for the truth's 
sake. 

Both Judah and Joseph are men of force and 
vision, but it is Judah alone who is worthy to 
plant the stock from which, in the fullness of 
time, should spring the supreme and ultimate 
Revealer and Messenger of God. 

Such was God's plan — such the foundations 
on which He built His vast design of a world- 
wide revelation of Himself to man through the 
obedience, first of an individual, then of a na- 



The Failure of a Nation 

tion selected and commissioned — His "chosen 
people/' Israel. To no race of men had ever 
been given so vast an opportunity; no nation 
had ever been so trained for an exalted mission 
in the fulfillment of God's world-wide plan. 
Yet never has there been in all history so tragic 
a failure. The very means which God took to 
make Himself known to the Jewish people be- 
came the rock on which they foundered. His 
almighty power revealed in awful majesty on 
Sinai was interpreted in terms of protection 
for themselves and destruction for their en- 
emies. This universal love, of which they were 
given countless evidences, was, in their minds, 
narrowed and confined lest it might touch 
others than themselves. His very presence, re- 
vealed to them in glory, was localized ; and the 
Creator of the universe, the Lover of all man- 
kind, was moulded into the measure of a tribal 
god inclosed within the material walls of taber- 
nacle and temple to be worshipped and honored 
by formal sacrifice and legal obedience, and 
only then so long as He proved considerate of 
their personal well-being and friendly to their 
national aims. And surely this was not the 
fault of God. By a great deliverance He had 
freed them from bondage; but for what pur- 
pose? With food from heaven He had fed 
them in their wanderings, and brought them 
into the land promised to their forbears and 
had given them national greatness; but to 
what end? In His love and wisdom He sent 



The Church's Life 

them messengers — poets, prophets, teachers. 
Through these He warned, appealed, besought, 
and threatened. But what was the meaning of 
it all? It must be confessed that such ques- 
tions had no interest for them, except as they 
could be answered in terms of personal or 
national blessing. Childishly self-complacent, 
arrogantly provincial, they turned deaf ears 
and blind eyes to the appeals and example of 
God's messengers and, refusing to see that 
they had been chosen, saved and given power 
solely in order to fulfill the mission of making 
Cod known to all the world, they precipitated 
the very disasters from which they trusted 
their God to deliver them. Time and again, 
with unwearying patience, God show r ed the 
Jews the inevitable consequences of their crim- 
inal blindness and narrowness, until at last 
with two mighty strokes He drove them out 
of their seclusion and dispersed them, agonized 
and despairing, among their hated enemies of 
Assyria (B. C. J22) and Babylonia (B. C. 
586). 

For a century and a half the Jews remained 
in exile. Meantime Jerusalem had been de- 
stroyed, and its walls levelled; the Temple had 
been burned. Thus not only was the center of 
Jewish worship laid waste, and Jewish nation- 
ality destroyed, but their reliance upon God as 
their peculiar protector and deliverer had 
proved false. Sad and tragic as the Babylo- 
nian captivity was, it seems to have been the 

10 



The Failure of a Nation 

only means by which God could make any im- 
pression upon the hardened exclusiveness in 
which the Jews had encased themselves. In 
one way it worked well. They of the captivity 
did come to look with loathing upon the religion 
of their captors, and they returned to Palestine 
in a chastened spirit, holding fast the concep- 
tion of the unity of God, and thereby made fit 
to serve once more as the vehicle of God's 
further revelation of Himself to all the world. 
Once more the phrase, "Hear, O Israel, the 
Lord our God is one Lord," became the char- 
acteristic expression of Jewish faith; once 
more Israel saw itself as the servant and 
messenger of the Most High. 

The nation returned to its Holy Land to find 
the latter a shrunken territory indeed. Galilee 
— the ancient kingdom of Israel — had become 
largely a Gentile colony ; Samaria to the south 
was found to have been occupied by a mixed 
race of Jews and Assyrian colonists who won 
the bitter hatred of the orthodox by imitating, 
in debased forms, the ancient religion of Juda- 
ism, and by actually building a rival temple of 
their own on Mount Gerizim. To the return- 
ing Jews remained only the restricted area of 
Judaea; and here, with devout and concen- 
trated energy, they set about restoring their 
former capitol, rebuilding the sacred Temple, 
and again enforcing the rediscovered Law. It 
was as though God had, with undiscouraged 
patience, again implanted in the minds of this 

11 



The Church's Life 

recalcitrant people the fundamental truth about 
Himself, and had determined to give them one 
more chance to make that truth known to a 
waiting world. 

But history repeated itself. Once more the 
Jew gradually returned to his tribal conception 
of God, deliberately scorning his God-given 
mission. The history of the centuries inter- 
posed between the close of the Old Testament 
record and the beginning of the New is a dim 
and confused story of futile struggles for 
Jewish independence and nationality, of selfish 
withdrawals into themselves, of deepening 
scorn for their neighbors, of steadily increas- 
ing religious formality and legalism. The 
average Jew of that time could, no more than 
the average Churchman of today, see the hand 
of God in his training, or hear the voice of God 
in his mission, or realize the inevitable result 
of his self-centered religion. The Jew, refus- 
ing to be set free in order to bear a message, 
slowly became forced into physical and mental 
bondage. Slowly but inexorably the bonds of 
foreign domination tightened about him until, 
at the dawn of the Christian era, we find him 
the despised subject of Rome, yet willfully un- 
conscious of his bondage and of the tragic fact 
that the glorious opportunity which was once 
his had passed from his grasp forever.* 



* See, in this connection, an admirable article by P. F. 
Underhill, entitled ''On the 'Failure of the Church'," in The 
Holy Cross Magazine for June, 1920. 

12 



The Failure of a Nation 

Here it would be well to pause for a moment 
and consider the question whether what we 
have been assuming as a fact is really so. 
Was God's revelation of Himself to the Jews 
ever meant to be universal ? Did He really in- 
tend them to carry His message into all the 
world? Was it in order to assure them of His 
favor and goodness toward them that He gave 
them the knowledge of Himself, or was it in 
order that they might be His means of bless- 
ing all the nations of the earth? In a word, 
Does God believe in foreign missions, or not? 
This is rather a crucial question because, if He 
does, there are many Christians today who do 
not agree with Him. Let us see, then, what the 
great men of the Jewish Church thought about 
this. 

It is perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon those 
prophecies which were at the very foundation 
of that one family w T hich God selected in order 
to accomplish His purpose for the world. To 
Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob Jehovah 
promised that the knowledge of God which 
had come to them should, through them, be a 
blessing to all the nations of the earth (Cf. 
Gen. 12:1-3; 26:4; 28:14). He swears by 
Himself and by His very existence that the 
whole earth shall, one day, be filled with His 
glory (Num. 14:21). The poets of Israel, 
having in mind the nature of God, are filled 
with the glorious assurance that there is no 
other possible objective in God's plan. It is im- 

13 



The Church's Life 

possible to read the Psalms * without realizing 
that, to the minds of the writers, the supremacy 
of God, over-ruling the evil in the world, over- 
throwing all opposition to His universal will 
and His supreme authority throughout the 
whole world, is a dominant note; and, more- 
over, that there is equally present to their 
minds the fact that this end is to be accom- 
plished primarily through a realization, on the 
part of the Jews themselves, that the mis- 
sionary responsibility rests upon them, and 
that they have, indeed, been set apart for that 
purpose, through the fulfilling of which alone 
they can confidently expect God's mercy and 
blessing. "God be merciful to us and bless us," 
they cry; but only "that Thy way may be 
known upon earth, Thy saving health among all 
nations." Perhaps the most perfect expression 
of this all-embracing expectancy is to be found 
in the great hymn of Asaph, David's choir- 
master, sung at the bringing up of the ark, and 
its establishment in the tabernacle (i Chron. 
16:8-36). It is the same with the great seers 
of Israel. What they see most clearly, and 
what they passionately long to make the people 
see, is that Israel is intended to be a center of 
light for all mankind, and that selfishly to 
appropriate that light or carelessly to hide it 
is to forfeit all claim to be the chosen of God. 
It would be impossible in a brief space to re- 

* See especially Psalms 2, 22 (latter portion), 45, 46, 67, 
96, 97, 148. 

14 



The Failure of a Nation 

view the message of the prophets, but through 
all their writings sounds the eager, dreadful 
cry against a people who had forsaken right- 
eousness, scorned alike the promises and the 
warnings of God, and, in seeking to monop- 
olize the grace of God, had blinded themselves 
to their high calling as a missionary people. 

The Book of Deuteronomy sets before the 
people the moral obligation of knowing and 
keeping God's law. Its acceptance will inevi- 
tably result in the outpouring of God's blessing; 
its rejection is, as inevitably, the source of 
every misfortune. It is to be thought about, 
talked about, written up in their houses, above 
all it is to be taught to the children so as never 
to be forgotten. Religious education was to 
play a supremely important part in the family 
life of the Jew — it was to be one of the greatest 
expressions of his mission (C/. # Deut. 6:4-15; 
11:18-21). And this was in order that the 
active righteousness of the Jewish people might 
be an example to all who came among them. 
Solomon builds and dedicates a temple for 
Jehovah. It is a place of worship primarily 
for the Jew, but not alone for him. To it, 
Solomon foresees, many will be attracted from 
other lands — strangers, not people of Israel; 
and for them he asks of God that when these 
Gentiles recognize the power and beauty of 
God as set forth visibly before them, He will 
answer their prayers as He answers those of 
His own people, that so "all the peoples of the 

15 



The Church's Life 

earth may know Thy name and fear Thee" 
( II Chron. 6 132, 33 ) . Long afterwards Isaiah, 
too, sees the attractive power of a people 
among whom God is truly worshipped. To 
him, as to Solomon, the Temple is the natural 
gathering-place for strangers; there they will 
be accepted with their prayers and offerings, 
"for mine house shall be called an house of 
prayer for all peoples. The Lord God which 
gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet 
will I gather others to him, beside his own 
they are gathered" (Is. 56:7, 8). 

Undoubtedly to both Solomon and Isaiah the 
attractive power of the Temple and of the 
worship of Jehovah had only one objective so 
far as Gentiles were concerned. They were 
thereby to be converted and brought into the 
commonwealth of Israel. But, after all, was 
not this ideal perfectly right and logical at the 
time ? To the Jews alone of all people on earth 
had been given "the oracles of God," they alone 
were the chosen of God, only within the Jewish 
Church was there safety and light through the 
knowledge of God. To convert.the Gentiles to 
Judaism was therefore the chief function of 
the Jewish people, and this Isaiah says can be 
done and will be done by the manifest loyalty 
of the people toward God's law and worship. 
To this he urges them, not for themselves 
within the covenant, but for the sake of those 
outside. It was God's will that all nations 
should have been brought to His Israel's light, 

16 



The Failure of a Nation 

if only, alas, she had kept it burning (Is. 60: 
1-3). This is the attracting power of loyalty 
to God. 

But that loyalty must have an out-reaching 
expression as well. Not only must outsiders be 
drawn in from all nations, but insiders must be 
sent out to all nations. This too is part of the 
message of the prophets. What is the Book 
of Jonah but a parable setting forth the su- 
preme obligation of the Jewish people toward 
the heathen? God's plan is to draw all men 
unto Himself to be united — Jew and Gentile 
alike — in one great community over which God 
Himself is King. In and through this "new 
Israel" shall be given the complete and final 
revelation of God. Even this final consumma- 
tion the prophets appear to see dimly. It is too 
small a task for the coming Messiah merely to 
raise up the tribes of Jacob; He is to bring 
salvation to the Gentiles throughout all the 
world (Is. 49:5, 6). To Him— the "Root of 
Jesus" — shall all nations seek (Is. 11:10). 
Through Him the glory of the Lord is to be 
revealed to all flesh (Is. 40:3-5). 

With clear, though doubtless contracted 
vision, Micah sees the day when God will be 
recognized as the source and center of all law 
and light, and when all nations shall seek Him 
(Micah 4:1-3). To Daniel is shown a vision 
of the time when all the kingdoms of the earth 
and all human sovereignty shall give way to 
the everlasting Kingdom of God (Dan. 2:44). 

17 



The Church's Life 

Through Zephaniah, the Lord speaks His ulti- 
mate purpose of bringing the peoples of the 
earth to serve Him in unity of purpose (Zeph. 
3:9). Zechariah pictures Jehovah as a man 
arousing himself in order to bring many na- 
tions to join themselves to the Lord and to 
rejoice in His presence (Zech. 2:10-13). 
Again he sees Jehovah as King over all the 
earth, while from His presence flow forth, east 
and west, His life-giving waters (Zech. 14: 
8, 9). Finally, Malachi sees the "one far-off 
divine event" as already present— the ultimate 
purpose of God already fully accomplished. 
"From the rising of the sun even unto the 
going down of the same my name is great 
among the Gentiles ; and in every place incense 
and a pure oblation are offered unto my name : 
for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith 
the Lord of Hosts" (Mai. 1:11). 

Such is the trumpet-call of the prophets of 
Israel sounding in the dull ears of their people; 
by such appeals do they strive to arouse the 
Jewish Church from its self-complacency and 
apathy. Obedience — Loyalty — High Example 
— Out-going Activity — Zeal for God and His 
Church — these are the notes of their call. 
"Mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou 
hast prepared before the face of all people; 
a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of 
thy people Israel." So, in the fullness of time, 
did a priest of God sum up the message of the 
prophets. "A light to lighten the Gentiles"! 

18 



The Failure of a Nation 

Had the Jews but seen the determinate will and 
purpose of God, what glory would have been 
theirs today! 

Three other features of the prophets' mes- 
sage should be noted. The Jew had a respon- 
sibility covering not only Religious Education 
and World-wide Evangelization, but toward 
Social Service as well. For this mission he 
had been given the most careful preparation. 
His code of moral and social law, his rules of 
hygiene, were perfect so far as they went. He 
had been taught his responsibility toward all 
others of his own race. Nevertheless, by the 
time of the prophets, he had forgotten many 
of these lessons. As in our own social system 
today, pride of wealth and position, oppression, 
greed, injustice, had dulled the feeling of 
brotherhood. Against these sins the prophets 
fulminated. Their warnings have a familiar 
sound in our ears. It is vain, they say, to 
attempt to serve God acceptably by sacrifices 
and offerings and worship, when all the time 
injustice and evil-doing characterize your rela- 
tions toward one another. The sight of you 
among the nations, so far from winning the 
Gentiles, can only serve to repel them from 
you and from your God. "Seek judgment, re- 
lieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead 
for the widow." Only so can your scarlet sins 
be washed out clean (Is. 1:16-18). Again, 
"Make thy shadow as the night in the midst of 
the noonday" (how cool that sounds in a torrid 

19 



The Church's Life 

climate !) . "Let mine outcasts dwell with thee" 
(Is. 16:3, 4). As to formal observances, surely 
self-discipline and self-sacrifice are not ends 
in themselves. Rather are they the means 
which enable you to have time and spirit to 
check oppression and to break evil bonds; 
ability and desire to feed hungry people and to 
provide poor people with shelter (Is. 58:5-7). 
It is Isaiah, too, who sees and points out the 
merciful character of the longed-for Messiah, 
which if the people will only show forth now 
they shall be so blessed of the Lord that all 
nations shall take notice (Is. 61:1, 2; 8, 9). 
Indeed the mercy and righteousness of God, 
reflected in the behavior of His people toward 
one another, is not for them alone; for all 
nations await the reign of righteousness, and 
the servant of God shall not fail nor be dis- 
couraged until justice is established throughout 
the world (Is. 42:1-4). Secondly, we should 
note how the prophets emphasize personal re- 
sponsibility in the discharge of the world-wide 
mission. Perhaps the most solemn of all their 
appeals to personal service is voiced by Ezekiel. 
The watchman on the walls has an individual 
responsibility; in sounding the warning of the 
enemy's approach he discharges that respon- 
sibility. So when God warns the wicked, 
through His watchman, and His watchman is 
quick to give the warning, he has performed 
his duty; but if he fails, he is guilty of the 
death of the wicked. This is the equal justice 

20 



The Failure of a Nation 

of God (Ezek. 33). Isaiah enforces the duty 
of personal service in a similar way. Jehovah 
has set watchmen on the walls of His city — 
they are the "Lord's remembrancers," to bring 
the things of the Lord to the minds of others. 
"Take ye no rest, and give him no rest, till 
he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a 
praise in the earth." Righteousness going 
forth as brightness, and salvation as a lamp 
that burneth — this is the objective of the 
Lord's remembrancers, for they have seen His 
righteousness; they have experienced His sal- 
vation (see Is. 62:1-2, 6-j). It is to those 
who, in personal service, are thus faithful to 
their trust that Jehovah promises a glory 
never to be dimmed. "They that teach others 
shall shine as the brightness of the firma- 
ment; and they that turn many to righteous- 
ness as the stars for ever and ever" (Dan. 
12:3). 

Thirdly, Ezekiel saw very clearly a fact 
which is quite as evident to us today. At the 
time he wrote, the Jews had become widely 
scattered. Ezekiel himself, while still a young 
man, had witnessed the overthrow of the King- 
dom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar, and had 
been one of the multitude deported to Babylon 
where, for the remainder of his life, he shared 
the fortunes of the Jewish exiles. As a prom- 
inent member of the colony thus placed in the 
midst of a heathen population, he had abundant 
opportunity to note how inadequately his fel- 

21 



The Church's Life 

low-exiles bore witness to their religion. Had 
they shown faithfulness to their God, they 
would have proved the "leaven to leaven the 
whole lump" of Babylonian idolatry (C/. 
Ezek. 36:23, last clause). As it was, however, 
they had proved anything but faithful. Indeed 
God's judgment against them is that they had 
profaned His holy name to such an extent that 
the Babylonians themselves scorned them for 
their inconsistency and taunted them and their 
God. These, they mocked, are the people 
of the mighty Jehovah, a god unable even to 
keep them in His own land (Ezek. 36:20, 
21). Today Christians are scattered all over 
the known world. Colonies of baptized busi- 
ness people from a Christian land are to be 
found in every great center of heathendom. 
Are they faithful in worship and witness ? Are 
they conscious of their missionary responsi- 
bility, or do they not rather bring scorn, by life 
and example, upon their religion, "profaning 
the holy name among the nations whither they 
went"? No man on earth has quite the mis- 
sionary opportunity of the Christian man of 
affairs in a heathen country, unless it be the 
Christian on his summer holiday in rural dis- 
tricts; yet one would almost say that by none 
other is the opportunity more fatally neg- 
lected. One can only fall back on God's as- 
surance through Ezekiel that, notwithstanding 
the disloyalty of His own people, He is deter- 
mined to sanctify His great name among the 

22 



The Failure of a Nation 

nations, and make them know that He is the 
LORD. 

This, then, is the message of the great poets 
and prophets of Israel. God revealed Himself 
to the Jewish people not for their own sake, 
but in order that, through them, His revela- 
tion might be made known to all nations. By 
every conceivable means He tried to show them 
the glorious opportunity. Time and time 
again He showed it to them, but as often as 
He showed it so often did they turn their backs 
on it. 

Then, at last, when His plan for revealing 
Himself to man had been thwarted by man's 
own will, God put forth the supreme effort of 
determined love. "For us men and for our 
salvation, He came down from heaven, and 
was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin 
Mary, and was made man." These are the 
words in which you and I express, week by 
week, the stupendous fact. That any wholly 
human being could serve as the revealer of God 
had proved a vain hope, but in the Son of God 
become man, the divine and human blend in 
one. In His divine nature Jesus Christ per- 
fectly aoprehends God and becomes the mirror 
of God, looking into which we see God; in His 
human nature He is one with us, and adapts 
His revelation to our capacity to receive it. 
Looking upon Him, we know what God is like. 
And on this basis God formed a new creation 
— a race of twice-born men, possibly as dis- 

23 



The Church's Life 

tinct from and as far above ordinary men in 
the scale of being as the latter are distinct 
from and above the lower creation. The mem- 
bers of this new race derive their life directly 
from Christ the Living One; from them God 
builds up His Family, His Church. He loves 
to call them His "new Israel/' for through 
them He plans to make Himself known to all 
men everywhere. To them He entrusts His 
message. To them He gives a mission. "Go 
ye," said the Son of God, "into all the world, 
and proclaim the good news." 

God has done His part, He has taken the 
last step possible. It rests with us, the mem- 
bers of His Church, as to whether again His 
plans miscarry, or whether, faithful to our 
trust, we carry our new life to those not yet 
reborn, whether close at hand or in the utter- 
most parts of the earth. 



24 



CHAPTER II 

A CHOSEN GENERATION 

Perhaps enough has been said in the pre- 
vious chapter to indicate two facts: first, that 
God has a message to man which He is keenly 
interested in having delivered; and, secondly, 
that, failing natural means, He has resorted 
to human agency. The message is no less than 
the revelation of Himself. His plan has been 
to reveal Himself first to one carefully selected 
man of spiritual capacity to receive the revela- 
tion; then, from him, to build up a people, 
chosen, isolated, disciplined, instructed, blessed ; 
in order that, through them, the message might 
be carried everywhere. The man was Abra- 
ham, the people, Israel, God's ancient Church. 

The plan proved successful in only small 
measure. Abraham and his immediate de- 
scendants — Isaac and Jacob — developed great 
spiritual capacity, and had their descendants 
shown a like spirit, there is no knowing how 
far the Jewish people might have progressed 
as messengers of God to all the world. Unfor- 
tunately the spiritual history of the race proved 
an ever-darkening sky in which appear, only 
here and there, a few planets of the first mag- 
nitude. Such men as Joshua, Samuel, David, 

25 



The Church's Life 

Elijah, a few of the kings, all of the great 
prophets — these men shine out as brilliant 
examples of faithfulness. But on the whole it 
must be acknowledged that so far as the Jews, 
as a people, were concerned, they failed to 
fulfill the purpose for which God had set them 
apart. To this general statement, certain ex- 
ceptions should be noted. First, the Jew early 
seized upon and held with unshakable tenacity 
the conception of the personality and unity of 
God; to this fact he testified vigorously and 
universally. Secondly, he preserved with scru- 
pulous care the sacred writings of his seers, 
which writings have come down to us as an 
inestimably precious heritage. For these two 
facts the world owes to the Jew more than it 
can ever repay. Thirdly — most important of 
all — there did develop among the Jews a spir- 
itual capacity which God could seize upon for 
the fulfillment of His ultimate purpose in the 
final revelation of Himself to man. The 
crowning glory of the Jewish race, as it is the 
culmination of its tragedy, is that it was a 
people worthy to bring the Christ to birth, but 
unable to recognize Him when He appeared 
among them. 

The New Testament introduces us to God's 
supreme venture of love. Again He chooses 
a man, but now it is the incarnation of Himself, 
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. To Him 
He entrusts the perfect revelation of Himself; 
to Him He gives the task of begetting a new 

26 



A Chosen Generation 

race _ a new Israel— a new Church— built up, 
not as before, from one nation, but from all 
nations and tongues, Jew and Gentile, rich and 
poor, with no distinctions among themselves, 
but distinguished from all others by their son- 
ship toward God, their knowledge of Him, and 
their determination to make that knowledge 
world-wide. So the Christian Church arises 
as God's messenger like the Jewish Church of 
old, but having this supreme advantage, that 
she is born of One divinely human and humanly 
divine, able perfectly to receive and perfectly 
to impart the complete revelation of God, and 
able further to make of His Church a trust- 
worthy witness, proclaiming God's message to 
all men everywhere, and thus fulfilling her 
mission. Such being the case, the mission of 
the Church— her reason for existence— be- 
comes a matter of very serious concern to 
every one of her members. For surely if a 
message from God to man is of any value at 
all, it is the one thing in human experience 
which is really vital, not only for the world to 
come but for this world. It is literally, as we 
shall see later, a matter of life and death. The 
message itself is supremely worth while, there- 
fore it is equally worth while to consider very 
carefully what that message is and what it 
involves. And here let me say m passing that 
there are very many people who, though they 
have been made members of the Church by 
Baptism, are quite unconscious of any special 

27 



The Church's Life 

benefit which has accrued to them thereby and 
naturally therefore feel no desire or obligation 
toward others in regard to it. Having little 
in the way of faith or of the knowledge of 
God, which is of any real use to themselves, 
why should they want to pass it on? With 
such I have no quarrel. Their religion — what 
there is of it — is merely a decoration, a super- 
fluity, it involves no issues to themselves, it 
entails no privilege or responsibility toward 
others. Why should it ? They fail to see that 
the Church has a mission, they are "not inter- 
ested in missions''; therefore, for them, any 
consideration of the subject is dull and aimless. 
But there are others to whom God is real, 
religion vital, faith uplifting. These have 
something worth sharing. Yet, for one reason 
or another, largely through lack of thought 
and knowledge, they have never been led to see 
the enormous significance of "missions." They 
have listened to "missionary" addresses; they 
have been periodically stirred to give some- 
thing — not much — to "missions"; they have 
possibly heard of The Spirit of Missions; but 
they have never really taken in the fact that 
the Church's mission has a very vital relation 
to themselves. Their attitude is like that of 
the boy at one of our Church Schools. His 
father, visiting the school on a certain occa- 
sion, met the master of mathematics, and in 
the course of conversation remarked, "My 
son, I believe, took algebra with you last year." 

28 



A Chosen Generation 

"Yes," replied the master somewhat quizzi- 
cally ; "but I shouldn't put it that way. He was 
exposed to it, but he never took it." It is for 
such persons that this book is written. They 
should be interested and active in the Church's 
mission. 

I say "The Church's Mission" rather than 
"Missions." And this because the latter word, 
whatever it meant a hundred years ago, has 
come to mean to the average layman something 
far smaller than the cause it represents. A 
palm tree and, standing under it, a tall indi- 
vidual in black coat, white tie and top hat, and, 
in the background, a crouching cannibal — isn't 
this the picture that rises before the mind of 
the average man upon hearing the word "Mis- 
sions"? Similarly a "missionary" is usually 
thought of as a peculiar person who feels called 
to go and "preach the gospel to the heathen"; 
the whole conception being based on a mis- 
understanding of what is meant by "the gos- 
pel," and the equally mistaken idea that, in 
order to see a "heathen," what is needed is a 
telescope, when, as a matter of fact, the naked 
eye, or even a looking-glass may serve the pur- 
pose admirably. Then, too, the words which 
suit the usual mental picture of "Missions," 
and have had their share in accentuating a 
totally inadequate conception, are those of the 
familiar "missionary" hymn, 

"From Greenland's icy mountains, 
From India's coral strand, 
29 



The Church's Life 

Where Afric's sunny fountains 
Roll down their golden sand:" 

The words are rightly endeared to many people, 
but the trouble with them is that while they 
mention several places with which most of us 
have no conceivable contact, which we have 
never seen and never expect to see, they say 
nothing of New York or Omaha or San Fran- 
cisco or any other place where you and I live, 
and where, therefore, you and I, as members 
of a Church with a mission, have a message 
to give. 

The word "Missions" also gives the unfor- 
tunate impression that there are all kinds of 
missions, and therefore all sorts of messages. 
Consequently the average layman has come to 
speak of "foreign missions" and "domestic 
missions" and "diocesan missions" and "paro- 
chial missions" ; and, worse still, he even picks 
and chooses among these, and states, some- 
times, as though he were perfectly reasonable, 
that he believes in one kind but not in another. 
Of course this is stupid, and could have been 
largely avoided if only we Churchmen had all 
been taught, from childhood up, that the one 
Church has one mission, which is to carry a 
message received from God and to deliver it 
to every man, woman and child within reach — 
to John Smith around the corner in my town, 
quite as much as to John Chinaman in Hankow, 
and vice versa. 

Of course it may be said in reply to this, 
30 



A Chosen Generation 

that we have come to use the words "missions" 
and "missionaries" in a special sense just as 
we speak of the sun's "rising" and "setting," 
though we know perfectly well that the sun 
does nothing of the kind. But the two cases 
are not parallel. It makes no practical differ- 
ence to us whether the sun rises in the morning 
or whether the earth turns round to meet it; 
we wake up and go to work just the same. But 
when we speak of "missions" and "missiona- 
ries" and limit the words to a special and pecu- 
liar type of far-off work or workers, we pro- 
duce a wrong impression, and do practical 
harm to the cause of Christ and to the general 
sense of personal responsibility toward the 
Church's mission. 

What, then, is the Church's mission, and 
what does it involve ? Let us consider the sec- 
ond question first. Suppose I am busy at my 
desk and want to see Mr. Jones presently. I 
say to my secretary, "I want to see Mr. Jones 
of 30 Main Street here or at his office an hour 
from now." This is sufficient if my secretary 
has ordinary intelligence. He at once does 
something — goes, writes, telephones or hires a 
messenger-boy. Of course he goes himself in 
case other duties permit; but in any case he 
doesn't sit still and take no action. He has a 
mission to perform, and evidently the discharge 
of that mission involves personal activity of 
some sort. The word "mission" implies activ- 
ity—- doing something. When we speak of 

31 



The Church's Life 

activity in connection with the Church's mis- 
sion, we do not of course mean only moving 
about. There are many kinds of activity other 
than physical. One of the most efficient mis- 
sionaries I ever knew was a bed-ridden woman. 
She read about the Church's work and work- 
ers ; she prayed for them ; her hands and brain 
were constantly active on their behalf. Her 
activity, constantly exercised, was of mind and 
hands. I know of another who, in the course 
of her latter fifty years, had amassed a for- 
tune of 1 08 godchildren, with every one of 
whom she kept in touch at monthly intervals 
and every one of whom was active in Church 
work. Her own activity as a missionary was 
of the letter-writing variety, and who can 
measure its value ? Again, there is the activity 
of putting one's hand into one's purse and 
taking it out again with the wherewithal to 
further the Church's mission. Very different 
kinds of activity, these; but all exceedingly 
valuable. 

But the discharge of a mission implies some- 
thing besides activity. There must also be the 
delivery of a message. Mere activity is not 
sufficient. My secretary must see to it that by 
some means Mr. Jones gets my message and 
gets it in time. It would be quite useless for 
him merely to walk to 30 Main Street and then 
walk back. He must, in some way, either di- 
rectly or indirectly, accomplish his object 

32 



A Chosen Generation 

Secondly, then, a mission implies the delivery 
of a message. 

These facts are true of the Church's mis- 
sion as of every other mission. They apply to 
every member of the Church. Every baptized 
person has a specific message which he is called 
upon to deliver to one specific person or pos- 
sibly to many. It devolves upon him to take 
some direct action without delay. For it must 
be quite plain that if the gospel is really what 
it claims to be — good news — much is involved 
in its announcement. Thus, in order to be 
"news" it must be taken to those who are either 
ignorant or unappreciative of it; to be "good 
news" it must be news the acceptance of which 
adds to the joy of living; and in order to be 
of use, as a matter of life and death, it must 
be brought in time. A messenger bearing 
abundant food to a starving man is of little 
use if he delays his mission and arrives only 
after the man has starved to death. 

Thirdly, if a man has a message to deliver, 
it is essential that he know precisely what that 
message is. It is not so necessary for him to 
determine just how he is to get the message 
across; but he must, at least, know what the 
message is about. 

What, then, is God's message to the world? 
The simplest way is to go straight to the Gos- 
pels- — the record of the Great Messenger Him- 
self. A message appears very early in His 
active ministry, indeed even before His min- 

33 



The Church's Life 

istry began; for John the Baptist heralded His 
coming by the statement, "Repent ye ; for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand. Make straight 
the way of the Lord" (St. Matt. 3 : 1-2; St. John 
1:23). This announcement appears to have 
been an important one in the mind of Christ, 
for as soon as John is no longer able to pro- 
nounce it publicly, He adopts it as His own 
preliminary message to the world (St. Mark 
1:14, 15). And surely there are abundant 
signs that the Kingdom of God is today nearer 
at hand than ever before in the world's history. 
God seems to have used even war to further 
His own ends. The determined efforts toward 
moral and social reforms throughout Christen- 
dom — efforts sometimes ill-directed and exag- 
gerated it may be, but none the less earnest; 
the suppression of "the people that delight in 
war"; the saner forms of social unrest; the 
vast swing of all civil government toward de- 
mocracy; the growing passion for Christian 
unity ; the increasing coordination of Christian 
forces ; the rapid spread of the Gospel in pagan 
lands, attaining, in some cases, the proportions 
of mass movements — what are all these but 
steps in the drawing nigh of God's Kingdom? 
Never was there a time when that declaration, 
made by the great Messenger of God so long 
ago, seemed nearer its fulfillment. But, as a 
preparation for that fulfillment, God calls man 
to repentance. Because the Kingdom is nearer 
than ever before, the deeper is the need for 

34 



A Chosen Generation 

men to examine themselves and their motives of 
conduct, and, wherever they have offended 
against righteousness, to repent and be con- 
verted — to turn around and take the opposite 
course. 

The whole trouble with the world today is, 
as it always has been, that the Church is not 
producing a sufficient supply of visible and 
effective righteousness to go round. This in 
turn is due to the fact that there are not enough 
Christians working overtime at producing more 
Christians. Hence, the coming of the King- 
dom of God on earth lags. This might be 
illustrated by a simple analogy. We are all 
painfully aware of the fact that if we need a 
new pair of shoes we have to pay two or three 
times as much as we paid for the same quality 
five years ago. Why? Because there are not 
shoes enough to go round. But why is the 
supply so short ? One reason may be that the 
shoemakers who worked overtime during the 
war are now experiencing the let-down that 
every worker feels after a period of unusual 
energy, and they have made up their minds to 
limit their hours of work; therefore fewer 
shoes are produced, and up goes the price. It 
is much the same with us Christians. The 
objective of the war was to overthrow the rule 
of might and to substitute for it the rule of 
right ; to this end — surely a righteous end — we 
all worked overtime. But the moment the 
armistice was signed we all experienced a les- 

35 



The Church's .Life 

sening of morale and began to congratulate 
ourselves on the fact that we could now take 
a rest, or at least that we were justified in 
diverting our thoughts and energies to the less 
serious concerns which we delighted in before 
the war startled us into the consciousness that 
we were in fearful danger of seeing the law 
of might actually put into effect the world over, 
and that we must stop the process at all costs. 
The blind folly of such an easeful course is 
becoming more and more apparent. The war 
proved a mighty stimulus to the effort to pro- 
duce more righteousness and peace in the 
world, but now all sorts of new unrighteous- 
nesses are cropping up ; the world is in turmoil 
and its peace is threatened in all directions; 
wide-spread discontent is apparent, and the 
discontented appear to be again prepared to 
invoke the old law of might in order to gain 
their ends. The truth is that the greatest 
dangers inherent in war are not those existing 
during the actual hostilities when a great cause 
keeps fighters and workers keyed up to high 
endeavor and limitless sacrifice, but rather 
those characteristic of the aftermath of war 
when the stimulus is gone and men are tired 
of struggling even for the right. It is the 
period of reconstruction, such as that we are 
now in the midst of, which really tries men's 
souls. What else brought on the war, what 
else explains conditions in the world now that 
the war is over, except the fact that the visible 

36 



A Chosen Generation 

supply of righteousness has never equalled the 
demand — that there have never been enough 
real Christians? And the remedy? 

Well, in the case of shoes, the remedy for 
the inadequate supply is to be found only in 
making more shoes. To this end every shoe- 
maker must work harder ; he might even devote 
part of his time to teaching some one else how 
to be a shoemaker. Not shorter hours than 
during the war, but longer ; not less work, but 
more and of a better quality. Precisely the 
same is it with us Christians. The present is 
no time for relaxing effort or shirking work. 
Righteousness and peace are scarce commod- 
ities today, the cost of producing Christians is 
high, the supply short. (The crowning trag- 
edy of the war was that it destroyed Christians 
and non-Christians indiscriminately, thereby 
decreasing the already too scanty supply.) 
What is needed on the part of Christians is 
not less work, but more and of a better quality 
than ever; not less determination to make the 
law of right supreme, but more. The job of 
every Christian at this present moment is 
surely to devote part of his time to showing 
some one else how to be a Christian. We have 
seen the actual good which God brought out 
of the war, but let us remember that while God 
does overrule and bless man's efforts to pro- 
mote His cause on earth, inadequate though 
these efforts may be, He cannot overrule for 

37 



The Church's Life 

good man's sheer indifference and laziness, or 
even his "faintness in well doing." 

But to return to our theme of God's mes- 
sage. However much our Lord, throughout 
His ministry, dwelt on the teaching of the 
Kingdom, this was rather the result of the 
accepted message than the message itself. The 
latter is found, in its most succinct form, in 
those words which are perhaps more univer- 
sally familiar than any others in the Gospel: 
"God so loved the world, that he gave his only 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him, 
should not perish, but have everlasting life" 
(St. John 3:16). Could any announcement 
open up more marvelous vistas of possibility; 
could the divine will for man be more per- 
fectly expressed ? Note the outstanding words : 
"God," "loved," "world," "gave," "life." Here 
is the clarion announcement of the redemption 
of all mankind; here also is the whisper to the 
individual soul — "whosoever believeth." 

This, then, is the fundamental, primary mes- 
sage of God through Christ. We may be able 
neither to understand it nor to explain it, but 
we can receive, believe and announce it. In- 
deed, as Christians, we can do no less. The 
disciples certainly had no conception of its 
meaning; it dawned upon them only as the 
weeks drew to months and the months to years. 
Nevertheless note how their Lord used these 
men — untrained, without understanding — as 
His messengers. Presently, when the impos- 

38 



A Chosen Generation 

sibility of His reaching large numbers of peo- 
ple personally becomes apparent, he chooses 
first twelve and later seventy of his followers. 
He tells them to proclaim the approach of the 
Kingdom, but, more than that, He gives to 
these ignorant, uninformed, men spiritual 
power to such a degree that the results astound 
them. And this, simply because they were 
willing to place themselves in His hands, to 
step out regardless of their self-evident unfit- 
ness, asking no questions, urging no excuses. 
Why can't Christian men and women show a 
like spirit today ? Why will they sit down and 
manufacture excuses, when Jesus Christ has 
come to them as closely as, for example, in the 
Blessed Sacrament, and bids them show at 
least some form of activity as His messengers ? 
For remember, those early disciples, whatever 
they lacked, had the one essential quality — 
they were "willing in the day of God's power." 
Moreover, they learned through their experi- 
ence itself. They doubtless expected no great 
results in themselves or others; but at their 
Lord's command they tried the experiment, 
and, like the crew of fishermen later, they re- 
turned elated, strengthened and blessed. Try 
it you who are shrinking, doubtful of your 
own ability, satisfied to remain inactive ! Note 
this also for your encouragement : In the case 
of the Seventy, at least, the Lord followed 
them, going to each place which they visited, 

39 



The Church's Life 

no doubt correcting their mistakes, certainly 
reenforcing their message. 

But let us go a step farther in discovering 
God's message and method. Occasionally be- 
fore the close of the Gospel narrative, almost 
always later, we find that these messengers 
heretofore called "disciples" — learners, are 
given a new title — "Apostles" — men sent. 
This is significant, for if a man is sent it must 
be with a purpose, and if we can find the pur- 
pose we shall also probably find the message. 
Pass from the Gospels to the Acts, noting by 
the way that it was only after Christ's physical 
presence was withdrawn from the disciples 
that they are commonly called Apostles. It 
is as if He knew that He could now depend 
upon them to bear the message as He had 
borne it, to be sent as He was sent. Indeed He 
knew that it was better, for the wider procla- 
mation of God's message, that His physical 
presence, with its limitations, should be with- 
drawn and that they should be left to other 
guidance in the task of proclaiming the mes- 
sage, increasing the number of messengers, 
and building up the Church to accomplish what 
He had begun (St. John 16:7-14). What, 
then, was the purpose for which the Apostles 
were sent? It is very plainly stated — "Ye shall 
be witnesses unto me" (Acts 1:8). Consider 
the word witness. It has two meanings as 
commonly used. It may have the meaning to 
see an occurrence ; or it may mean to bear testi- 

40 



A Chosen Generation 

mony to something known or experienced. 
Every lawyer is familiar with this latter use 
of the word. I may say, "I witnessed a display 
of Northern Lights last night." You may 
doubt it. I reply, "But I am ready to bear wit- 
ness to the fact that I witnessed it." 

Now what was it that these disciples had 
witnessed or seen — an event of such a stupen- 
dous character that they could not help bearing 
testimony at once to the fact ? In other words, 
what was their immediate message after the 
Day of Pentecost, and what relation did it bear 
to their Lord's message to the world? The 
fact was evidently the Resurrection. They had 
seen their Lord done to death beyond all doubt ; 
equally beyond all doubt, they had seen Him 
risen from the dead. It was an astounding 
fact, unique in human experience. If even to 
the disciples, duly warned beforehand to expect 
the Resurrection, the event appeared beyond 
belief, it was doubly necessary that it be abso- 
lutely proven for the sake of those who should 
come after. No wonder, therefore, that when, 
owing to Judas Iscariot's treason and suicide, 
it became at once advisable to choose some one 
to take his place, only one requirement ap- 
peared essential ! It must be one who, like the 
Eleven, had witnessed the Resurrection (Acts 
1:22). This was the fact to which they were 
all to bear witness, and therefore it was this, 
rather than repentance, or the coming of the 
Kingdom, or even God's announcement of His 

41 



The Church's Life 

love, which became the center and core of their 
first preaching. Many deductions were drawn 
from this great fact, but St. Peter's first ad- 
dress to the people has for its fundamental 
theme the certainty of the Lord's Resurrection 
and continued life. Their message was that, 
in one case at least, and to their certain knowl- 
edge, death was vanquished and eternal life 
proved possible. 

But possibly this case was a unique one. It 
may be objected that Jesus Christ rose from 
the dead because He was God, and that there- 
fore His Resurrection has no significance for 
us ordinary men. To this it may be replied 
that to the disciples certainly this explanation 
never presented itself. They had seen Him 
live as a man, be tempted as a man, suffer as 
a man, die as a man; and now they had seen 
Him rise from the dead as a man. An ordi- 
nary man? No. But the kind of man which 
every human being has the privilege of becom- 
ing when he is made a son of God. While the 
writers of the New Testament nowhere teach 
the inherent immortality of man as such, they 
do teach constantly that eternal life becomes 
the possession of every man new-born into 
God's family, and kept in touch with the life 
of God in Christ. 

But there was still another message — an- 
other reason for testimony. "Ye shall be wit- 
nesses unto me," their Lord had said. Who 
was it whom they had seen, and lived with and 

42 



A Chosen Generation 

known through three years of close intimacy? 
St. John, the Apostle of deepest insight into the 
true nature of Him whom he loved so pro- 
foundly, gives the answer. "The Word of 
life," he calls Him (i John I :i). There is no 
doubt of whom he is speaking. The phrase 
instantly recalls the prologue of his Gospel — 
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God. ... In 
him was life" (St. John I :i~4). And turning 
again to the epistle, we read, "The life was 
manifested, and we have seen it, and bear wit- 
ness, and show unto you that eternal life" 
( i John 1:2). This was the Being whom their 
eyes had looked upon, whom their hands had 
handled, of whom they had had a personal 
experience. It was to Him that they were to 
bear witness; and He was "the Word" — the 
expression — of God Himself. Was not this 
precisely what He had said of Himself in the 
days when they had failed to understand? 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" 
(St. John 14:9). They had seen God in the 
flesh; so far as human minds can apprehend 
God, they knew, by experience, what God was 
like; and, best of all, they could tell others. 
Here, surely, was a message worth telling to 
men groping for God in the dark, if haply they 
might feel after Him and find Him. And how 
about ourselves who, though not having seen 
Him, yet have believed; who have before us 
the record of His life and words ; who can turn 

43 



The Church's Life 

to that record and see in it a perfect picture 
of what God is like? Then, having mastered 
every detail of that picture, how can we resist 
the insistent call to show it to others, even to 
one other, and thus dispel the gloom of those 
who, consciously or unconsciously, are in that 
most desperate and heart-breaking of condi- 
tions, "without Christ, having no hope, and 
without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12)? 

Finally, let us see the climax of the whole 
message of those first Apostles. We have seen 
how eagerly and insistently they dwelt upon 
the message of the Resurrection — of the vic- 
tory of life— a message to an ignorant, dying 
world. We have seen, too, how, having seen 
God in the flesh, having heard Him and lived 
with Him and been taught by Him, having 
experienced His love and pity and sympathy 
and patience and majesty, they were in a posi- 
tion to tell all men what God was like. One 
thing only remained: from their contact with 
the ever-living Christ, they became aware of a 
new life in themselves. Somehow the Christ 
was able to transmit His own indestructible, 
unending life to others. I don't mean to say 
that this was realized at once. Indeed the fact, 
though witnessed to by every one of them 
whose testimony we have, is not fully and gen- 
erally grasped even today. Yet the testimony 
is perfectly plain. Let us examine it. 

To the biologist, one fact is incontrovertible. 
No created being possesses inherent life. Life 

44 



A Chosen Generation 

is an endowment of all organized beings, from 
the lowliest up to man, but it is a transient 
endowment. It may be short, or it may outlast 
centuries, but sooner or later death intervenes, 
life vanishes, and the creature returns to the 
elements of which it was composed. In God 
alone — the Source of life — the I AM — the 
Everlasting One — is life inherent. What then 
is this that Jesus Christ says of Himself ? "As 
the Father hath life in himself; so hath he 
given to the Son to have life in himself" (St. 
John 5 :26). It is one of those quiet statements 
of fact such as our Lord was constantly mak- 
ing about Himself, only to be as constantly 
misunderstood because of the implications im- 
possible at first to grasp, and therefore, as 
many modern teachers would have us believe, 
to be explained away somehow. And doubtless 
some of His similar statements are open to such 
interpretation. "I and my Father are one." 
Is there not a sense in which a similar oneness 
exists between a truly married husband and 
wife? Or take the saying previously quoted, 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
St. John later recognized its full meaning; but, 
after all, might it not mean merely that, in 
character, Christ more nearly resembled the 
imagined divine ideal than has any other 
human being? And so with the other claims 
of Christ. But how about this, of inherent 
life? Read it again. The statement is very 
direct; the words perfectly simple. But how 

45 



The Church's Life 

stupendous the claim! No less than the claim 
to have in Himself inherent, indestructible, 
communicable life, in the same degree and 
measure as has the Eternal God, Creator of all 
things visible and invisible. Explain it away 
if you can! Reject it if you like! But there 
it stands for every Christian to accept with all 
its implications. If proof be needed over and 
above His own word, it is found in the Resur- 
rection. His life had so strong and inherent 
a quality as to be invincible even in the pres- 
ence of Death. 

Nor, as we have just seen, is this all. The 
Apostles certainly believed and taught that 
this ever-living Christ is able to communicate 
to otherwise mortal human beings His own 
inherent, indestructible, eternal life. Indeed 
He Himself gives this assurance: "Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my 
word, and believeth him that sent me, hath 
eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but 
hath passed out of death into life" (St. John 
5 124) . Here is held out, not some future hope, 
but a present reality — not "shall have," but 
"hath" eternal life— not "shall pass" out of 
death, but "hath passed." How well St. John 
realized eternal life as an accomplished fact 
in himself and others who had touched the 
Living One! "God gave unto us," he writes 
years later, "eternal life, and this life is in his 
Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he 
that hath not the Son of God hath not the life" 

46 



A Chosen Generation 

(i John 5 :n, 12). There is no message worth 
giving unless Christ rose from the dead (1 
Cor. 15:14). The message of the Resurrec- 
tion lacks point unless, because He lives, we 
also live (St. John 14:19). It was not so 
much a proof of His deity as an assurance of 
invincible life to all who are in union with Him. 
So our Lord sums up the objective of His 
mission in words fraught with a glorious op- 
portunity for all the sons of men in every phase 
of existence — "I came that they may have life, 
and may have it more abundantly" (St. John 
10:10). No darkest corner of earth is beyond 
the reach of that shining message; no aspect 
of human life need remain untouched by it. 
This is the objective of "missions"; in these 
terms we may find the perfect definition of 
that ill-used word. 

Tremendous as is the responsibility thus en- 
tailed upon us Christians, the privilege is no 
less. Eternal life is our possession. For us 
death has no terrors. Yet all about us are men 
and women who have not the life, and who, as 
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews ex- 
presses it, are "through fear of death, all their 
lifetime subject to bondage" (Heb. 2:15). 
From the African savage with his fetich 
against the ubiquitous powers of evil and death, 
to the modern man of super-civilized terror of 
germs, the majority of mankind — of our own 
acquaintances — exist under the shadow of 
fearful death, and spend their hours guarding 

47 



The Church's Life 

against its insidious approach. But for the 
Christian there is no death, only a momentary 
falling asleep when his limited work is done 
and he is ready to continue that work else- 
where, free and unhampered ; "For the law of 
the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me 
free from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 
8:2). Under the power of such an assurance, 
other promises of the Master of Life become 
realized. Anxiety and worry in the present, 
uncertainty and fear regarding the future — 
these curses of modern life which drive men 
and women into premature old age — are super- 
seded by their direct opposites. "These things 
have I spoken unto you, that my joy may be 
in you, and that your joy may be fulfilled (com- 
plete)" (St. John 15:11). "Peace I leave with 
you; my peace I give unto you" (St. John 14: 
27). "These things have I spoken unto you, 
that in me ye may have peace" (St. John 16: 
33). What more could we want? What 
greater assurance of happiness could we 
imagine? The fear of death gone forever; 
life eternal our possession here and now; all 
anxiety dissipated; peace and joy our portion. 
This seems to me the crowning message of 
God, through Christ, to a world in desperate 
need of just what the message promises. 

If this be true, it follows that what our Lord 
says about a new birth, and the expression 
used by St. Paul to describe Christians, are 
literal facts. "Except a man be born anew 

48 



A Chosen Generation 

(from above), he cannot see the kingdom of 
God" (St. John 3 13). "Except a man be born 
of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into 
the kingdom of God" (St. John 3:5). "If any 
man is in Christ, he is a new creature" (11 
Cor. 5:17). This may oblige us to revise our 
ideas regarding the ascending scale of created 
things. It seems to introduce us to a new order 
of beings. Heretofore we have been accus- 
tomed to think of the inorganic Mineral King- 
dom; next above it the Vegetable Kingdom, 
above this the Animal, and, at the summit of 
the latter, Man. But how if above Man there is 
a higher Kingdom of new-born men — a "new 
creation" ? So it surely is ; and this new crea- 
tion — the citizens of God's Kingdom — the 
members of God's Family — of His Church — 
constitutes a new class of human beings, dis- 
tinguished from all below it by the fact that 
those admitted to it possess a kind of life, 
described as everlasting, which is different 
from that possessed by ordinary mortals, and 
is as much higher in the scale of being as 
human life is above that of the lower animals.* 
Of course it must be added, with the utmost 
degree of emphasis, that, like all analogies, this 
cannot be pressed to a purely logical conclu- 
sion; for the glory of human beings is the fact 
that every one of them has the capacity of 



* This will be recognized as the view so convincingly set 
forth years ago by Professor Drummond in his book, Nat- 
ural Law in the Spiritual World. 

49 



The Church's Life 

being born again into immortality — to rise in 
the scale of existence; while the lower animals, 
so far as we know, can not. In this tran- 
scendent possibility lies your opportunity and 
mine. For to us is entrusted this message of 
life; and, more than that, we know how the 
life may be secured. Jesus Christ said that 
unless a man is born anew of water and the 
Spirit he has no entrance into the Kingdom of 
God; and the implication is that by such Bap- 
tism he does obtain the new birth and begins 
the new life. This is the door into the King- 
dom — we know of none other. It is true that 
God may provide other means of entrance. 
Who would place limitations upon His infinite 
grace? But we are not assured of any other; 
we are assured of this. We know, too, both by 
teaching and experience, how the new life — 
weak and incomplete at first — may be nour- 
ished and strengthened. By the careful nur- 
ture of the new-born life, by the strength of 
the Holy Spirit given with the laying on of 
hands in Confirmation, by the receiving of 
Christ Himself in the Holy Communion, by 
purposeful prayer, by study of God's word — 
in brief, by all the means of grace, the new life 
develops and expands until it reaches its 
earthly consummation and attains unto "the 
unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the 
Son of God, unto a full grown man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of 
Christ" (Eph. 4:13). In the whole process, 

50 



A Chosen Generation 

Baptism is the birth, completed in Confirma- 
tion ; the Holy Communion is the development ; 
likeness to Christ is the objective; eternal life 
is the possession. The Church selects these 
Sacraments as all-important and, indeed, as 
"generally necessary to salvation" (A Cate- 
chism. fThe Book of Common Prayer, p. 270). 
If it be objected that in thus emphasizing 
God's manner of working through material 
means trivial in themselves — water, bread, 
wine — we are limiting His freedom of opera- 
tion, we may reply that, in the first place, we 
are not presuming to say what He can or what 
He can not do; and, in the second place, that 
the consensus of Christian thought - through- 
out the centuries is our warrant for believing 
not only that God works by self-imposed law, 
but that the Sacraments are the normal expres- 
sion of His law working in the realm of grace. 
The liberty of God never degenerates into 
license. Since first He moved on the face of 
the waters creating life, He has been self- 
restrained by law and order. The law by 
which the planets revolve in their appointed 
orbits, or water becomes wine in the vital pro- 
cesses of growth, or the ocean breathes in 
rhythmic tides, or bread is transmuted into the 
Body of Christ, or consecrated hands become 
the channels of grace — in these alike we recog- 
nize the operation of Law. If the labors of 
scientific men and their consensus of opinion 
have sufficed to reveal the laws of God in the 

51 



The Church's Life 

material realm so that we guide our daily 
actions by them, even though there may be 
operations of law unknown to us as yet; it 
would be strange indeed if the mind of the 
Church has been led astray when it sought to 
discover God's laws in the spiritual realm, and 
has failed to formulate them aright, even 
though much yet remains to be revealed. The 
theory of the freedom of the Holy Spirit apart 
from law has its logical outcome in the mad 
delusions of the "Holy Rollers. " When, there- 
fore, we would show men the way of salvation, 
we can do so, with assurance and safety, only 
as we direct them to Baptism and the whole 
sacramental life of the Church. 

Such, then, is the message of "good news," 
and it is only that final and complete revelation 
of God in Christ which we call Christianity 
that brings any sufficient assurance of eternal 
life and adds to that assurance the perfect 
means of securing and maintaining it. No 
other revelation, such as is to be found express- 
ed in incomplete forms among all nations, pos- 
sesses this assurance or this power. To every 
doubting, struggling, fearing son of man, the 
Christian can point the way to life and peace 
and joy ; to every mortal, it is within the Chris- 
tian's privilege to open the Kingdom's gates. 
"Here is water; what doth hinder thee to be 
baptized?" "Take, eat ; this is my body." "He 
that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood 
hath eternallife" (Acts 8:36; St. Matt. 26:26). 

52 



CHAPTER III 

LIFE MORE ABUNDANTLY 

We have seen that God's supreme message, 
through and in Christ, to us men, is the good 
news of life eternal, beginning normally at 
Baptism, empowered in Confirmation, main- 
tained by constant contact with the living Son 
of God through the Eucharist and God's other 
means of grace. We Christians are thus re- 
born into conditions of existence infinitely 
above that of ordinary humanity, and in that 
higher realm of being we are maintained with 
increasing fullness, if we choose. The funda- 
mental characteristics of that plane in the 
ascending scale of life are its eternal quality, 
its perfect peace and the fullness of joy, quite 
irrespective of surrounding conditions. This 
is a certainty of common experience. We have 
seen, too, that it is our manifest duty, as it is 
our privilege, knowing the way of life, to lead 
some one else to see and follow it. 

It is surely remarkable that, if these are real 
experiences, they should have so small a part 
in the thought and life of the average run of 
new-born people. It is almost impossible, in 
most cases, to distinguish them from the lower 

53 



The Church's Life 

order of mortals. Once on Sunday they are 
seen to enter the doors of a special building, 
but why they do it and what they do when they 
get inside, are enigmas to their friends out- 
side. Possibly if the latter knew that the new- 
born man merely followed a custom of his kind, 
and that all he did was to say Amen a dozen 
or more times in an hour; repeat, with perfect 
unconcern, a formula of life-changing beliefs, 
hands in pockets, on his face a vacant stare at 
his neighbors ; listen drowsily to some reading 
and talking; once a month or even less fre- 
quently be given a bit of bread and a sip of 
wine — perhaps, if they knew this, they might 
wonder still more whether there was, between 
the Christian and the non-Christian, any real 
difference of such a character as to make in- 
vestigation worth while. The Christian has 
been re-born into a higher sphere of existence, 
yet most of his concern is with affairs in the 
lower sphere. Thus the birthday which he 
celebrates so joyously is obviously not his real 
birthday (though exception might here be made 
of the Roman Catholic who, as a rule, does 
recall his "name-day" and does celebrate its 
anniversaries). When he was baptized, the 
Christian was endowed with life unending; 
yet, in his more serious moments, he speaks of 
the "end of life," and the prospect of "death" 
rather appals him. A fellow-Christian passes 
over into Paradise, and he says, "Poor fel- 
low!"; if the relationship has been a close one, 

54 



Life More Abundantly 

he dresses in somber black and mourns visibly 
and at length. Even the religious press has 
caught the habit, and prints notices to the effect 
that such and such an aged Christian has just 
"entered upon eternal life/'' 

The Christian has vowed before God to be 
and to remain all his life a faithful soldier and 
servant of Christ, and therefore to obey God, 
to fight for His cause against every evil thing, 
and to serve in His Name. This he has adopted 
as his profession, whatever he may do to get 
a living ; yet one is forced to acknowledge that 
if every soldier fought as half-heartedly, and 
every servant gave as inefficient service as does 
the average Christian, the world would be 
nothing but a hideous caricature of what God 
intended it to be. He has probably forgotten 
the date of his Confirmation, when the Holy 
Ghost came upon him with power, eager to 
abide with him forever. To go without his 
breakfast is a hardship not easily to be borne, 
but to forego his bit of morning prayer or to 
oversleep himself and miss the early Eucharist 
does not disconcert him much. In a word, this 
average Christian seems habitually to think of 
life in terms of mortality, and of his relation to 
God in terms' of unreality. Given the power 
to live on a high plane, he is content to exist 
most of the time on a lower. One recalls the 
clever remark of a famous English actor when 
discussing with a certain Bishop the relative 
appeal of the stage and the pulpit. "The truth 

55 



The Church's Life 

is," said he, "that whereas we actors present 
fiction as if it were fact, you parsons present 
fact as if it were fiction." It is needless to 
say that the fault today lies not so much with 
the clergy as with the laity. The religion 
of the average layman appears to have 
little foundation in recognized and valued 
fact. The whole matter is exceedingly puz- 
zling, if God and everything connected with 
Him is more than the vain imaginings of 
man. 

I am not arguing for a life withdrawn, re- 
mote, secluded; but I know that every Chris- 
tian needs to make God more real to himself if 
he is to make Him real to any one else; in 
other words, the Christian needs to model his 
thinking and his daily life more literally upon 
that of Christ. This by no means implies 
separation from the world or from the affairs 
of the world. Our Lord never prayed that His 
disciples should be secluded. He Himself was 
anything but a recluse. He was keenly alive 
to the world about Him. He was interested 
in people's marriages and funerals, in their 
social gatherings, in their fishing, their tax- 
gathering, their homely pursuits, their busi- 
ness. He knows quite well — He proved it Him- 
self — that the possession of eternal life is not 
a search-light directed heavenwards only, but 
a glowing sun to irradiate every corner of earth 
and every phase of human life. 

It is important, therefore, to find out just 
56 



Life More Abundantly 

what our Lord meant when He spoke of a more 
abundant life. Had He in mind only spiritual 
life, and was His message only to the souls of 
men, or did "life" mean to Him all its mani- 
festations? You and I are conscious, if we 
are normal human beings, of three kinds of 
life. I walk from my house to my office and sit 
down at my desk, thereby showing that I pos- 
sess physical life. I write a page of this book; 
my mind works ; I perceive evidences of mental 
life. The Church bell rings, and I find myself 
able and glad to pray; I confess my sins, am 
assured of pardon, and I receive the blessed 
Sacrament; I have come into contact with 
spiritual presences and realities, and I immedi- 
ately become as conscious of renewed life in my 
soul — that is, of spiritual life, as I was, a few 
moments before, of physical and mental life; 
indeed, in joining in that half-hour's service, I 
have exhibited all evidences of life which I 
possess — physical, mental, spiritual — body, 
mind, soul. 

Surely then in promising to men a more 
abundant life, our Lord must have had in mind, 
not spiritual life only, but every aspect of life. 
His actions bear this out. The sight of imper- 
fect or maimed bodies drew His instant and 
active sympathy — He laid His hands upon 
them and healed them. He found in His dis- 
ciples a body of "unlearned and ignorant men," 
and for three years He developed their mental 
life until their minds became so abundantly 

57 



The Church's Life 

alive that the product of some of them has lived 
through twenty centuries, and shows today 
more practical vitality than that of any other 
group of philosophers which the world has ever 
known. So, finally, with His main objective — 
more abundant spiritual life. Oftentimes He 
appears to have exerted His healing power on 
men's bodies merely as a means of reaching 
their souls ; but always He was pouring out His 
own richness of spiritual experience and the 
abundant vitality of His own soul upon all 
who would receive. Thus, His disciples had 
been taught to pray all their lives, but seeing 
Him in the spiritual activity of prayer, they 
realized their own pitiable deficiencies and 
begged Him to supply their souls' want (St. 
Luke 1 1 : i ) . Thereupon He taught them to 
pray in the words so familiar to us. Later, 
toward the end, He taught them the very spirit 
of prayer, reminding them that hitherto, 
though they had learned the outward form of 
acceptable prayer, they had never realized what 
it meant to pray in His Name or character, 
nor could they until His likeness and character 
had become more perfectly reproduced in them 
(St. John 16:24). Finally, He gave them the 
Sacrament of His Body and Blood to be their 
spiritual food and sustenance. Thus, by teach- 
ing them to worship as He worshipped, and 
by giving them the means of coming into the 
closest conceivable touch with Him and of 
abiding in Him and He in them, He, the life 

58 



Life More Abundantly 

of the soul, shared with them His own abun- 
dant spiritual life. 

The practical bearing of all this on the 
Church's mission in the world today is obvi- 
ous. If it be true — as I think it is — that the 
Church's business, and therefore that of every 
member of the Church, is to touch, with vitaliz- 
ing power, every man's life in all three of its 
manifestations, then the Church has been right 
in these latter years, in going throughout the 
world establishing her hospitals and schools, 
that through their instrumentality the living 
Christ may minister to the bodies and minds 
of people everywhere; and, above all, in seek- 
ing to transmit life for the soul by providing 
for Church extension in the broadest sense of 
the term, including evangelization in all its 
forms, the teaching and training of converts, 
the administration of Baptism, and the erection 
of suitable church-buildings where the people 
may be taught the dignity of worship and the 
beauty of holiness, and where they may receive 
the Holy Communion rightly and duly admin- 
istered. 

Time was when people conceived of the 
Church's mission as strictly limited to pure 
evangelism, and when they even decried all 
social and educational work in connection with 
"Missions" as a dangerous departure from an 
ideal. With this discussion we need not con- 
cern ourselves. All we need do is to discover, 
if possible, the manner in which Christ re- 

59 



The Church's' Life 

garded His mission and what means He took 
to fulfill it. Personally, I cannot avoid the con- 
clusion that when He spoke of "life more abun- 
dantly" He saw the full round of man's life, 
in all its manifestations, as the object of His 
expansive and uplifting power — that He was 
eager for all men to have "salvation" — abun- 
dant health — in body, mind and soul. Yet no 
one can fail to recognize that the soul was 
always His chief concern, to be reached and 
given life and health by any and every means, 
and that, consequently, hospitals and schools — 
medical practice and education — in fact, all 
philanthropic agencies meet their highest ob- 
jective, from Christ's standpoint, only when 
they are fundamentally Christian, and when 
they recognize in all their work, that the appli- 
cation of Christ's power to the soul is the one 
supremely important and ultimate aim. 

If this be true, it will be interesting to con- 
sider whether the principle is applicable to the 
Church's mission everywhere, and, if so, how 
it is to be applied. If the Church represents 
the projection of Christ's life in the world, 
and the continuation of His ministry to the 
world; and if, further, He is our supreme ex- 
ample in connection with our mission, it would 
appear that that mission should always and 
everywhere include hospitals, homes for the 
poor and neglected, asylums, orphanages, play- 
grounds and other agencies for ministering to 
bodily needs ; schools, colleges, seminaries and 

60 



Life More Abundantly 

other means of mental and industrial train- 
ing; and, above all, church buildings and an 
adequate supply of workers, ordained and lay, 
to preach the Word, to administer the Sacra- 
ments, to provide opportunity for worship, and 
to minister effectively to the spiritual needs of 
the community. Evidently these three forms 
of missionary activity are expressed today by 
the terms, Social Service, Religious Education 
and Church Extension. These, together, con- 
stitute the full round of the Church's mission, 
and those Christians who engage in them are 
properly "missionaries." 

Two important points, however, are to be 
noted in connection with this programme: — 
first, that only as philanthropy and education 
are permeated with and directed by the spirit 
and power of Jesus Christ, are they truly ex- 
pressions of the Church's mission; and, sec- 
ondly, that every baptized man, woman and 
child, as a member of the Church, is bound to 
be a missionary, i. e., to take some active part 
in Christian Social Service, Religious Educa- 
tion, or Church Extension. 

How far and in what way this three- fold ex- 
pression of the Church's mission is carried 
out depends on circumstances. When the 
Church enters a heathen or pagan country, 
she has to perform her mission unaided by any 
institutions about her. It may be that the best 
opening is through preaching, the distribution 
of Christian literature, or some other form of 

61 



The Church's Life 

making the Gospel known. This is Evangel- 
ization, Or it may be that the work of a phy- 
sician presents the best opportunity at the mo- 
ment; or possibly a hold can best be secured 
upon the children, and, through them, their 
parents be attracted, by means of a Christian 
school. Here are Social Service and Religious 
Education. But, however the work starts, it 
must eventually include ministry to the whole 
of life — Body, Mind and Soul; hence the typ- 
ical mission station in the foreign field, when 
developed, will include, as a minimum, a church 
building, a school and a hospital, or at least 
some representation of all of these activities. 
In the domestic field the case is somewhat 
different, and, while the theory remains the 
same, its application may have to be modified. 
The controlling factor which obliges the 
Church, w T hen establishing herself in a foreign 
field, to provide medical service and education 
as well as churches, is of course the lack of any 
such agencies having a Christian foundation 
and motive, and, in many cases of any such 
agencies at all. In China, e. g., the first 
Christian missionaries found no facilities for 
education along useful lines, and Chinese med- 
ical practice was worse than useless. The lack 
had to be supplied. Modern Japan has estab- 
lished an admirable public school system, and 
her medical practice is of the very best, but 
the Christian motive is, of course, lacking. 
Both China and Japan owe their advance in 

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Life More Abundantly 

public education and medical science to the ex- 
ample and teaching of Christian missions, but 
in both instances the Christian motive is want- 
ing, and I repeat again that if medical science 
and education are to fulfil their ultimate aim, 
they must be built upon and permeated by the 
spirit and power of Christ. Deprived of that, 
the doctor is comparatively helpless, the 
teacher is without adequate objective. Be- 
cause China had neither modern schools nor 
hospitals when the Church first went there on 
her mission, she had to establish these institu- 
tions herself, and this is true of all lands to 
which the Church first carries her message. 
But in the United States, the Government as- 
sisted by private enterprise does provide abun- 
dant means for education and health. Schools 
are everywhere; the country is, if anything, 
overstocked with doctors ; philanthropic works 
form a part of the social programme in every 
community; and it is a country governed by 
ideals which have their source in Christianity. 
Under these circumstances, what is the 
Church's duty in fulfilling her three-fold mis- 
sion — physical, mental and spiritual? Be- 
cause the public school system is not definitely 
Christian, is she to follow the Roman com- 
munion, and establish generally her own 
schools; because medical schools are not con- 
cerned with the religious belief of their stu- 
dents, is the Church to go into the business 
of training doctors and nurses herself and plac- 

63 



The Church's Life 

ing them in her own hospitals? Or is there 
some other alternative which, under the cir- 
cumstances, she ought to adopt? To these 
and similar questions there must be some ade- 
quate answer which, as members of the 
Church, you and I are bound to think out and 
reply. 

The Church and Physical Well-being 

Taking physical well-being as the objective 
of social service — hospitals and medical prac- 
tice in general, as an illustration — what re- 
ply are we to give to the above questions ? 

On the whole we would probably agree that 
the abundance of first-class hospitals in Amer- 
ica, as compared with China, and the admir- 
able service rendered by them to the com- 
munity, make it unwise for the Church to 
duplicate them by establishing hospitals of her 
own. Under certain circumstances it may be 
advisable for a large institutional parish to 
have its own free dispensary, or for the Church 
at large to maintain a hospital; and the same 
is true of homes for the aged and infirm, or- 
phanages, and other philanthropic agencies. 
But, as a rule, there are plenty of such insti- 
tutions established by the State or through 
public or private enterprise. This fact, how- 
ever, by no means implies that Church people 
are free from responsibility in the matter. On 
the contrary, such institutions present one of 

64 



Life More Abundantly 

the most fruitful fields for missionary work on 
the part of Christians. If Christ, with the 
limited and narrow opportunities which His 
surroundings presented, was constantly and 
actively interested in the physical welfare of 
people about Him, it is all the more incumbent 
upon us, His followers, w T ith facilities enor- 
mously increased, to make every possible use 
of those facilities. It is the obvious duty of 
the Christian layman to seize every opportu- 
nity, with the Lord Himself as his Companion,, 
to carry to the sick, the suffering and the de- 
spondent the encouragement and good cheer 
of his own abundant life. Ready access, un- 
der proper restrictions, is usually obtainable, 
and there is no more useful outlet for Chris- 
tian sympathy and helpfulness than frequent 
visits to those less fortunate than ourselves; 
nor is there any work more richly rewarded. 
Such practical mercy "is twice bless'd; it bless- 
eth him that gives, and him that takes ... it 
is an attribute to God Himself." 

There is another approach to this matter 
which Christians should carefully consider. 
Hospitals, Social Settlements, etc., — even those 
established by the Church herself — show a de- 
plorable tendency to become secularized or at 
least to admit the presence of Christ only on 
sufferance, as it were. At least it is rare, ex- 
cept among Roman Catholics, to find that 
Presence recognized and relied upon to any 
great degree, in hospital-management or prac- 

65 



The Church's Life 

tice, among patients or staff. This fact is the 
more striking when we consider our Lord's 
prominence in healing as in all works of mercy, 
and the further fact that practically every 
modern philanthropic enterprise owes its or- 
igin to the Church, and was at one time re- 
garded as a special function of the Church. 
It is unnecessary to inquire here how the 
Church came to relinquish a work peculiarly 
her own ; but it is pertinent to ask whether, in 
view of the secularizing tendency in modern 
medical and other philanthropic w T ork, and the 
development of medical science and practice 
on a materialistic basis, a serious obligation 
does not rest upon every Christian to bring his 
personal influence and example to bear upon 
the situation, to the end that Christ Himself 
shall w T alk the hospital wards in the fullness of 
His strength and comfort; and, further, that 
every prospective medical student be shown 
the example of Christ — the Source of life and 
health; and his own need of Christ, in the 
daily practice of his profession, not only for 
himself but for his patients. The Christian 
physician or surgeon has opportunities for mis- 
sionary service unequalled in any other voca- 
tion. Of all men, the doctor has most need to 
be a Christian. 

But there is still another and most vitally 
important aspect of this matter to be consid- 
ered, if we are convinced that the practice and 
teaching of our Lord and His immediate fol- 

66 



Life More Abundantly 

lowers are guides for the Church today. A 
full discussion of the direct action of the power 
of Christ, through faith, to the healing of dis- 
ease may well be left to wiser heads than ours. 
But the following facts are plain enough : Our 
Lord healed those who were willing to be 
healed, and who had faith in His ability (St. 
Matt. 9:28-30; 13:55-58; St Mark 9:22-29). 
This was done, sometimes privately ( St. Mark 
7:32-34), more often publicly (St. Mark 1 :32- 
34); sometimes with a visible act (St. Luke 
13 :i2, 13 ; St. John 9 :6, 7) ; sometimes at a dis- 
tance and with no physical contact (St. Matt. 
15:22-28; St. Luke 7:2-10). In some cases an 
act of prayer on His part is either stated or 
implied (e. g., St. John 11 :4i-44), though it is 
doubtful whether, in His constant life of 
prayer, any request for healing power in a 
specific case was needed. He recognized, in 
certain stated instances at least, that disease 
was of Satan, or his agents (St. Luke 13:16; 
St. Matt. 12:22, 28. Cf. also 11 Cor. 12:7); 
when He instructed His disciples regarding 
their mission, and sent them out, He associated 
healing of the sick with the casting out of dev- 
ils (St. Matt. 10:8; St. Luke 10:17-20). He 
promised His disciples further, that the power 
manifested through them should exceed even 
that which they had seen in Him (St. John 
14:12). After the coming of the Holy Ghost, 
as previously, though now in greater measure, 
this power became manifest in miracles of 

67 



The Church's Life 

healing wrought through the Apostles and 
others working in Christ's Name. It is im- 
plied that even their shadow passing over the 
sick had a healing effect, and that the same 
effect was produced by articles of apparel 
which had been in contact with them (Acts 
5:15; 19:11-12. Cf. St. Matt. 14:36). 

These extraordinary and "special" demon- 
strations of power seem to become less fre- 
quent as the period covered by the Book of 
Acts draws to a close; but as the Church be- 
came more fully organized, we find that one 
of her many functions was that of healing, 
and that this function was concentrated in cer- 
tain individuals, especially the presbyters (1 
Cor. 12:28; Jas. 5:14, 15). This quotation 
from St. James indicates that, by the begin- 
ning of the second century, the presbyters 
were accustomed to exercise a definite method 
of healing through prayer and anointing with 
oil, with probably the laying on of hands. This 
is quite in accord with what we are told in 
the earliest of the Gospels (St. Mark 6:13; 
16:18). 

This brief survey is sufficient for our pres- 
ent purpose, and if we believe that Christ is 
actually with His Church today, in the fulness 
of His power, the question naturally occurs, 
Why has the Church not taken full advantage 
of this power? Healing the sick was a nor- 
mal expression of our Lord's ministry, and 
was accepted as a normal and ordered func- 

68 



Life More Abundantly 

tion of the early Church. Whatever Christ 
Himself did on earth should surely be pos- 
sible of accomplishment, through all time, by 
His Church in which He still lives, "the same 
yesterday, today and for ever." If He was 
the source of life and health in the first cen- 
tury, why not in the twentieth ? Of course He 
would be if the Church had retained her active 
faith in His power, and if the whole of med- 
ical practice were based on the belief in it 
But so long as the Church regards the work 
of an accredited, devout and successful agent 
of Christ in the ministry of healing as an ex- 
traordinary and "pentecostal" thing, rather 
than as the normal action of Christ through 
His Church, just so long will our Lord be able 
to do no mighty work, save healing a few sick 
folk; and this, because of our unbelief at which 
He marvels (St. Mark 6:5, 6). 

But let it be noted here that while the heal- 
ing power of God may evidently be transmitted 
through any devout and faithful person (for 
who would dare limit the grace of God?), yet 
in the early Church God's power to heal was 
manifested through ordained men and in sac- 
ramental form — that is, the "inward and spir- 
itual grace" (faith and healing) was signified 
by an "outward and visible form" (the touch 
of presbyters and the oil of anointing). We 
thank God for his rich gifts through any and 
every agency, but if we would experience His 
power to the full, should we not permit Him to 

69 



The Church's Life 

use His appointed means, rather than oblige 
Him to resort to extraordinary ones ? 

If, again, God in Christ is the source of life 
and health, it would seem apparent that med- 
ical science and attention to the laws of hy- 
giene, though they may indirectly supplement 
the work of God and further serve as a warn- 
ing against disregard of His laws, can never 
supplant His direct action. God has always 
taught His people that He works among men 
only by man's cooperation, as witness the mi- 
nute instructions regarding hygiene given, 
through Moses, to the Jews, and resulting in 
an extraordinarily high standard of physical 
well-being in that race. Who can doubt, also, 
that the modern advance in medical science 
and surgical skill is the gift of God whose de- 
sire is the development of man's mental pow- 
ers? But, granting all this, it is a serious 
question whether, in view of our Lord's exam- 
ple as a healer, the Church today is not disre- 
garding a very important part of her ministry, 
and whether she is not making a grave mistake 
in entrusting the health of her people to those 
who tacitly or deliberately eliminate God in 
their practice. As a matter of fact the aver- 
age medical practitioner of today is a materi- 
alist, and is inclined to regard faith in the 
power of God to heal as unworthy of serious 
consideration in practice. Happily, this whole 
matter is now beginning to receive the atten- 
tion which it deserves, and it is worthy of 

70 



Life More Abundantly 

note that the communion which has, in the 
highest degree, retained the faith and order 
of the early Church, is also the one which is 
most prominently taking the lead in a possi- 
ble return to the practice of the early Church 
regarding the healing of the sick. 

The Church and Education 

The American type of democracy rightly 
demands that there be a sharp boundary be- 
tween the function of the Church and of the 
State, which neither may pass. Thus public 
education is a function of the State, and the 
Church, as such, must not interfere. Public 
worship is a function of the Church, and with 
it the State has no concern.* This is quite as 
it should be. Most of us would be absolutely 
opposed to intrusting our children to the State 
for instruction in matters of religion and faith. 
Yet, as Christians, we are agreed that religious 
instruction, concerned as it is with ultimate 
truth and the soul's well-being, is of far more 
importance than so-called secular instruction. 
How are American children to acquire it? Of 
course one obvious answer is, In the home. 
Unfortunately, however, the home as a center 



*It may be noted, in passing, that of late years, in times 
of epidemic or through a strict interpretation of extreme 
regulations regarding the use of alcohol, the State has shown 
a tendency to overstep the boundary and to interfere un- 
warrantably with the Church in matters of custom and even 
of faith. 

71 



The Church's Life 

of religious life, is not what it used to be. 
Family prayer, grace before meals, united 
reading and study of the Bible — these are be- 
coming more and more of a rarity even in 
nominally Christian homes. Indeed, the aver- 
age Christian parents are too ignorant them- 
selves of the fundamentals of religion to give 
their children any proper instruction — a fact 
which is, in itself, an arraignment of the 
Church as a teacher. Hence the Church, in 
this dilemma, started Sunday schools, or 
Church schools as they are being called today, 
to supplement the religious teaching, or lack 
of it, in the home. Such as they are, these 
schools have served a valuable purpose, but 
no one could possibly claim that they have fully 
met the need. A present indifferent and ig- 
norant laity is the sufficient indictment of the 
Sunday school as it has been conducted in the 
past. The manner of it is sufficiently famil- 
iar. For an hour or less, once a week, those 
children who could be induced to come volun- 
tarily or who were forced by their parents to 
attend, received more or less desultory and 
fragmentary instruction from volunteer teach- 
ers who were themselves, in many cases, so 
ill-instructed that they had to cram up each 
lesson in advance or be coached by the rector. 
The sessions of the school lacked enforced dis- 
cipline ; often they presented the confusion of 
a menagerie; they rarely afforded the slight- 
est opportunity for serious study; their pro- 

72 



Life More Abundantly 

gramme was a picture-puzzle with no time to 
put it together. In some great institutional 
parish, or through the unaided genius of some 
one superintendent, a partially effective Sun- 
day school has been developed here and there 
— that is, effective as compared with the aver- 
age Sunday school, not as compared with any 
real educational institution. But on the whole 
we are safe in saying that the Sunday school, 
for years, has been such an exhibition of in- 
competency and haphazard methods that com- 
petent people have looked upon the teaching of 
a Sunday school class as an activity unworthy 
of their energies. Worse still, the children 
themselves unconsciously note a contrast. 
They see the day school with its obligatory and 
universal attendance, its four or five hours of 
study daily, its well-trained teachers, its prac- 
tical bearing upon the activities of life. The 
contrast between this and the conditions pre- 
vailing in the average Sunday school is too 
glaring to escape the sharp minds of children. 
No wonder that to the mind of the average 
child, as to that of his parents, religion and 
the fundamentals of religious faith and experi- 
ence are Sunday affairs only, and that religious 
education bears no comparison in importance 
with secular education. 

This deplorable state of things was per- 
mitted to continue, partly because people 
seemed to have become dulled to the practical 
and every-day importance of a knowledge of 

73 



The Church's Life 

God, especially when imparted to children at 
their most impressionable age; and partly to 
the fact that while the principles of modern 
psychology and pedagogy were rapidly modi- 
fying the methods of secular education, there 
were very few apparently to whom the possi- 
bility ever occurred that these principles might 
be equally applicable to religious education. 
Perhaps an excuse is to be found in the fact 
that, in the main features of the average Sun- 
day school, it was difficult to recognize any re- 
semblance to an educational institution. 

Within the past few years, however, within 
the Episcopal Church and largely owing to the 
efforts of the General Board of Religious Ed- 
ucation, the Church school is developing into 
something really worth while. The demand is 
becoming insistent that teachers be thoroughly 
trained for their task; definite system, care- 
fully planned on approved modern lines, is tak- 
ing the place of the lack of any system what- 
ever; and to the regular instruction in the 
school are being added week-day activities as 
the logical outcome and expression of the les- 
sons taught. 

Those who are interested in the religious 
education of children should, of course, inform 
themselves regarding the so-called Gary Plan, 
whereby children in the public schools are per- 
mitted, during certain school hours, to receive 
religious instruction under the auspices of their 
various communions, such instruction being ac- 

74 



Life More Abundantly 

cepted for credit by the school authorities. 
But I am interested here primarily with the 
Church school as an increasingly attractive and 
valuable means of religious education, and one 
which is supremely worthy of active coopera- 
tion on the part of men and women who are 
capable of directing their missionary efforts 
along the lines of a more abundant mental life 
for children. Naturally, however, such ef- 
forts must not be limited to children. For 
adults, there is the Bible Class, and all forms 
of Mission Study Classes. Possibly the time 
may arrive when the Church school shall be- 
come so complete an answer to the need for re- 
ligious education, and shall so thoroughly com- 
mend itself to the common-sense of all Church 
people, that attendance will no longer be con- 
sidered derogatory at any age, and that the 
curriculum will include instruction in the 
Church's mission and cognate topics, such as 
will be deemed essential to every Churchman's 
education. When that time comes we shall 
see a development of religious intelligence and 
activity undreamed of at present; but, mean- 
time, the obvious duty of every Churchman, 
if he be, or can be made, capable of it, is to 
fulfil one phase of his missionary obligation 
through leadership in the Church school or in 
connection with Bible or Mission Study for 
adults. 

I have taken Hospitals and Schools as illus- 
trations of Social Service and Religious Edu- 

75 



The Church's Life 

cation — of Christian ministry to the bodies and 
minds of men. But this one illustration of 
Social Service is manifestly only one. In a 
Christian land, unlike a pagan, there are count- 
less philanthropic agencies giving an opportu- 
nity for definitely Christian cooperation on the 
part of every one. But, no more than in the 
case of hospitals, does this fact lessen the de- 
gree of personal Christian opportunity and ob- 
ligation. Not only hospitals, but homes for 
the aged and infirm, asylums, orphanages, 
agencies for the protection of womanhood, to 
say nothing of reformatories, jails and pris- 
ons — these, and countless other institutions 
are within the field of missionary activity on 
the part of Christians. The same reasoning 
applies to them in general as we have applied 
specifically in the case of the hospital. They 
too, tend to become merely "institutional" and 
therefore secular and Christless. They too, 
need the constant interest and the active co- 
operation of sanely Christian people who bring 
with them the presence of our gracious Lord. 
For we can not too frequently remind our- 
selves that He gave Himself to the work of 
philanthropy ; He did not turn it over, nor did 
He recommend turning it over to an "insti- 
tution." And I repeat again that mere philan- 
thropy, apart from, personal contact with 
Christ, always fails of the highest objective 
— the ministry to the soul. 

Happily in these days, social service of all 
76 



Life More Abundantly 

kinds is so well organized that the necessity 
for individual initiative in good works, with its 
inevitable mistakes and discouragements, is 
not as great as it once was. In practically 
every community the individual who desires 
to serve along these lines will have no diffi- 
culty in finding other like-minded people who 
are already organized for a similar purpose. 
,The Associated Charities; the various organ- 
izations for Service, patriotic and otherwise; 
Immigration Bureaus; Juvenile Courts, and 
countless other organizations, national and 
local, afford abundant opportunity for Chris- 
tian ministry, in association with others, to the 
physical and moral needs of the people 
about us. 

Finally, it should go without saying that 
citizenship in a Christian democracy requires 
that every citizen be familiar with general so- 
cial conditions in his own community. The 
housing of the people, the public schools, the 
charitable and penal institutions of the town 
should be matters of concern, of active interest, 
and constructive criticism. To find fault with 
existing conditions, purely on the basis of hear- 
say, and to blame the city or the State or the 
Church for abuses which could be minimized 
if individual citizens would first find out the 
actual facts and then seek to remedy the con- 
dition by intelligent and united action — these 
are faults peculiar to a democracy where the 
temptation is to regard State and Church more 

77 



The Church's Life 

or less like two locomotives running on sepa- 
rate clear and level tracks, well supplied with 
fuel, and with expert train-crews requiring no 
watching. It is sometimes forgotten that en- 
gines require the best fuel and plenty of it; 
that even expert engineers occasionally make 
mistakes, that signals are not always set at 
"safety," that the destination of the two trains 
is the same and that if they were on the same 
well-laid track, one pushing and the other pull- 
ing up the steep up-grade, they might bring 
the train to its objective point on schedule 
time. 

The term "general social conditions" surely 
includes also all questions pertaining to the re- 
lation between labor and capital. Nowadays 
no one can claim to be well-educated in a so- 
cial sense who allows himself to remain ig- 
norant of the theories underlying social jus- 
tice, and of the conditions which make for the 
opposite ; nor can any one be called truly Chris- 
tian who is not striving according to his abil- 
ity to help the one and defeat the other through 
proper legislation, and, more effectively still, 
by personal investigation, active example and 
individual sympathy. Nor should it be for- 
gotten that the evils connected with present 
social conditions are not confined to the slums 
of our great cities or to the centers of indus- 
trial life. The lack of the simplest rules of 
morality and decency in many rural parts of 
these "Christian" United States is appalling. 

78 



Life More Abundantly 

The bulk of the population in vast areas of our 
country is as truly pagan as if America were 
China. Everywhere there is the need of put- 
ting into effect the social teaching of Christ. 
The wonder of the principles which He taught 
and practiced is that after the lapse of two 
thousand years and under conditions so pro- 
foundly changed, they yet remain absolutely 
practicable. Wherever they have been ap- 
plied in even the smallest degree they have, 
to that extent, proved to be the best, and in- 
deed the only practical solution, of every so- 
cial problem — the remedy for every social ill. 
It is therefore supremely incumbent upon us, 
as Christians, to make these principles our 
chief study, and then to apply them with all 
diligence and confidence, knowing that only as 
we follow in His steps shall we find the dim and 
arduous track leading to the City of God. 

To sum up our conclusions then: The 
Church, as the living Body of Christ, has a 
three-fold mission on earth. Her privilege 
and her duty are to provide every man, woman 
and child with an opportunity to become a 
sharer in a more abundant form of life, inci- 
dentally for the body and the mind, but pri- 
marily and supremely for the soul, whereby 
man is raised above the plane of mere human- 
ity into membership in the Family of God, and 
eternal life is imparted and maintained here 
and now. This three-fold mission of the 
Church is expressed in the terms Social Serv- 

79 



The Church's Life 

Ice, Religious Education and Evangelism or 
Church Extension. Since Christ Himself is 
today — as always — the Way, the Truth and 
the Life, no form of philanthropy or of edu- 
cation which fails to claim and utilize His ac- 
tive and personal cooperation can be com- 
pletely effective. It follows that the Church 
must see to it that social service is fundamen- 
tally and distinctly Christian ; that the impart- 
ing of a knowledge of God as revealed in Christ 
is one of her chief functions; and that it is her 
main privilege to bear the message of eternal 
life, through Christ, into every corner of the 
earth, especially where the need of His abun- 
dant life is greatest. Finally, since the 
Church is composed of individual members, 
each sharing in the life of the whole, each hav- 
ing his special function in the whole Body, each 
sharing in a common responsibility toward the 
whole, and to all mankind apart from the Body 
but capable of union with it, it is manifestly 
the duty of every member to become a mis- 
sionary through active participation in one or 
more features of the Church's three-fold mis- 
sion in his own community, and to the world 
at large.* Only as every member realizes 
this ideal will the Kingdom of God come and 
His will be done, on earth as in heaven. 



* In this connection, two definitions may be found of value. 
Bishop Gore defines "the world" (as that term is used in the 
New Testament) as "Society organized apart from God." 
The word "Religion" may be defined as "A knowledge of 
God influencing the conduct of man." 

80 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MODEL MISSIONARY 

We have seen thus far that the message 
which Jesus Christ proclaimed to men was a 
message of possible life, richer and fuller than 
any before known — a life dependent upon 
union with Him, the source of life; attained 
normally through Baptism; maintained by the 
Holy Communion and other means of grace 
(literally, channels of gifts) ; powerfully af- 
fecting every manifestation of life — physical, 
mental and spiritual; and transmissible, pri- 
marily and directly from, the Source itself, but 
secondarily and indirectly through every new- 
born child of God to those about him. 

It is important now to consider rather more 
in detail the earthly ministry of Christ, in or- 
der to see, for our own guidance as mission- 
aries, just how He, the supremely successful 
missionary, conducted His mission. 

First, let us note that while we know little 
of the first thirty years — the passive years, as 
we may call them of His ministry — what we 
do know reveals a character which must have 
had a profound influence upon those about 
Him,. Obedience to those in immediate au- 

81 



The Church's Life 

thority over Him as a child is a characteristic 
of His early years (St. Luke 2:51). Such 
implicit filial loyalty and obedience as is im- 
plied in the phrase, "He was subject unto 
them, ,, cannot have failed to impress His play- 
mates in the village of Nazareth where every 
one knew every one else. He proclaimed, not 
in words probably, but in the more persuasive 
language of example, the laws which should 
govern the lives of children. 

Beneath this characteristic, however, and di- 
recting it, was a. sense of a higher relation- 
ship. When, at the age of twelve, He was 
taken to Jerusalem for His Confirmation, as 
we would say, He had already reached the con- 
viction that, for Him, there was a law of obedi- 
ence higher than that implied in any human 
relationship — an authority divine and supreme. 
However we read the words, "Knew ye not 
that I must be in my Father's house" — or, 
"about my Father's business" — or, "in the 
things of my Father," the meaning is equally 
clear. Of course He is speaking not of 
Joseph but of God. To God He owes the 
obedience of a son. The Temple, where He 
delights to remain searching into God's law, 
is His heavenly Father's house. It is God's 
business that calls for His active cooperation. 
As a child is owned by his parents, so He is 
owned by God. We may readily grant that 
so high a degree of spiritual insight and self- 
dedication is rare in boys of twelve; it is not 

82 



The Model Missionary 

unique, however ; it should be a matter of com- 
mon experience, prayed for, hoped for, counted 
upon. 

St. Luke sums up the character of the boy 
Jesus in a few striking phrases: "The child 
grew, and waxed strong (in spirit), filled with 
wisdom; and the grace of God was upon him." 
"And Jesus advanced (increased) in wisdom 
and stature, and in favor with God and man" 
(St. Luke 2 140 and 52) . If I had a son whom 
I had not seen for many years and from whom 
I had not heard ; and a friend, having seen him 
recently, should bring me news of him simply 
in the terms quoted above, I would desire no 
more. I would be assured that, wherever he 
was, whatever doing, he was exemplifying to 
all about him the normal life of a son of God 
— not needing "conversion" but growing nat- 
urally and healthfully, increasing in all that 
makes men wise, vigorous in character, popu- 
lar among his fellows and influencing them for 
good, and manifestly directed by the presence 
of God. Such a life, however quietly lived, is 
the perfect fulfilment of a man's mission. 
First, then, let it be noted that even as a child, 
our Lord performed a missionary service— 
He was a Home missionary. I wonder 
whether our Lord's constant attendance upon 
the synagogue worship and instruction, not 
only as a child but as a grown man, was not 
an important factor in His development. He 
certainly showed, throughout His life, a mas- 

83 



The Church's Life 

terly and practical knowledge of the Scriptures 
such as few of us possess. If this be so, why- 
is membership in a Sunday-school class sup- 
posed to be rather derogatory in the case of 
young men and women today? 

The record of His life between the ages of 
twelve and thirty is still more meagre. In- 
deed, nothing is known regarding those eight- 
een years, except that after Joseph's unre- 
corded death, He succeeded him as the village 
carpenter (St. Mark 6:3). This is enough, 
however, to have stamped forever with divine 
approval and with dignity the simplest man- 
ual labor. And who can doubt but that the 
young laborer put into His commonest work 
all the skill of which He was capable? No 
skimping of a job, with Him; no parsimonious 
counting of the hours of work; no mere eye- 
service — alert before His employer, indifferent 
when not watched; no merely superficial ex- 
cellence in His work; no trying to make bad 
workmanship or material pass for good! Of 
all this we may be sure, knowing His character 
as a boy and the integrity of His later life. 
Knowing it, we may justly conclude that, 
through watching Him, His fellow-townsmen 
heard the high call to a more honest perform- 
ance of all daily labor, as in the sight of God. 
Secondly then, our Lord, even in the seclusion 
of a country village, proved Himself an In- 
dustrial missionary. Again, Jesus of Naz- 
areth was well-known as a regular church- 

84 



The Model Missionary- 
goer, sometimes taking the leadership in cer- 
tain parts of the Service (St. Luke 4:16). I 
wonder if this constant practice was without 
its effect on His neighbors; and whether a 
similar custom on our part, rigidly adhered to, 
rain or shine, hot or cold, at home or on vaca- 
tion, convenient or otherwise, isn't about as 
telling and effective a form of missionary work 
as the average Churchman can perform. At 
any rate, our Lord was preeminently a mis- 
sionary through Church loyalty. 

At the age of about thirty, He left the quiet 
of His home ; the passive ministry of His early 
years was closed; urged by the insistent needs 
of the world, and obedient to His Father's sum- 
mons, He entered upon a ministry of extraor- 
dinary activity. As we have seen, the idea 
of activity is inherent in the word "mission," 
and our Lord found Himself burdened with 
a message demanding the most unresting toil 
for its delivery. 

The Roman province of Palestine was a 
small area measured in terms of our own facil- 
ities for getting about rapidly and conven- 
iently. But in the first century, it was no light 
task for a traveller without money and obliged 
to do practically all of his travel on foot, to 
cover an area measuring 65 miles by 35, or 
about the size of the State of Delaware. Such 
was our Lord's own home-district of Galilee, 
and He made no less than eight circuits of this 
district during the three years of His active 

85 



The Church's Life 

ministry. Besides this, He visited Samaria; 
Judsea, at least three times ; and the two half- 
Gentile regions in the extreme north — Caesarea 
Philippi and Phcenice. Truly an Itinerant 
missionary, tireless under the spur of His mis- 
sion. In this He was in striking contrast with 
His immediate predecessor, John the Baptizer, 
as well as with that other famous teacher — 
Gautama the Buddha — five centuries earlier. 
The Buddha and John allowed themselves to 
be sought out by men ; Christ sought men out. 
The opening chapter of St. Mark's Gospel 
will always be one of the most important bits 
of writing in existence; for in it is given an 
account of a single and complete day in our 
Lord's life, from one morning until the next. 
Here are given not only His methods of work, 
but the principles which underlay His mission- 
ary activity. One of these latter is evidently 
the covering of as much ground as possible. He 
taught briefly in the morning, and allowed 
Himself to be interrupted in order to cure a 
man apparently insane. The teaching over, He 
goes home and, finding His host's mother-in- 
law in bed with a fever, He heals her. After 
dinner, the news having gone about, He is be- 
sieged by sick and insane people until night- 
fall. He snatches a few hours' sleep and then, 
long before morning, He is off to the hills for 
the re-creation of prayer. The crowds follow. 
Never was there such need on people's part, 
such opportunity for helpfulness on His. Ca- 

86 



The Model Missionary 

pernaum is a place of great importance; the 
stage is set for an overwhelming impression; 
let Him win that city, and Galilee is His ; and 
not the Galileans only but possibly more than 
one of the official family of Herod himself. 
He is immensely popular — His excited follow- 
ers call out to Him, "All are seeking thee." 
Yet He isn't in the least excited Himself. 
"Let us go elsew r here into the next towns," He 
says, "that I may preach there also." It was 
not that he had definitely accomplished any- 
thing in Capernaum, or that He saw no fur- 
ther opportunity there, or that the people there 
had no further need of Him. No, He worked 
by method, and that method was to touch for 
good as many people as possible in the brief 
time at His disposal. From this very begin- 
ning to the bitter end He was an Itinerant mis- 
sionary; as was afterwards said of Him — and 
an enviable testimony it is — He was the man 
who "went about doing good" (Acts 10:38). 
We may or may not think that this method of 
missionary work is equally adaptable to mod- 
ern needs and conditions. That question is 
not of immediate concern. All that we are 
endeavoring at present to discover is what kind 
of a missionary Jesus Christ was and on what 
principles He conducted His mission. Cer- 
tainly itinerancy was one of them. 

It is almost needless to point out that our 
Lord was a medical missionary, and that He 
thereby put his stamp of approval for all time 

87 



'The Church's Life 

upon Christian medical missions. The chap- 
ter from St. Mark's Gospel just referred to is 
a record of purely healing work. Indeed, if 
the scenes depicted in that record were taken 
by themselves, we would conclude that Jesus 
of Nazareth was purely a healer with no spe- 
cial aim other than mere philanthropy ; yet even 
St. Mark does not dwell as does St. Luke upon 
this striking feature of our Lord's ministry. 
And when He commissions His recently se- 
lected Apostles, it is to heal all manner of dis- 
ease and sickness (St. Matt. 10:1). 

Again it is of value to note that He was a 
missionary to all classes of people alike and 
without discrimination. Not only was this a 
matter of principle with Him — a fundamental 
way of accomplishing results — but it seems to 
have been His choice as well. St. Luke gives 
His statement of the principle, followed at once 
by an example of His practice (St. Luke 7:31- 
50). We know how constantly He repudiated 
the ascetic practice of John the Baptizer, by 
accepting social courtesies from the rich ; and, 
on the other hand, how gladly and eagerly He 
seized every opportunity to meet intimately 
those f rom whom no social return could be ex- 
pected. It is well to note, in both cases, that 
it evidently gave Him the keenest pleasure to 
meet people of all sorts ; that He was quite as 
fearless of contamination from social and spir- 
itual sources as from physical; he no more 
shrank from intimate contact with a despised 

88 



The Model Missionary 

tax-gatherer or a woman of notorious ill-re- 
pute than with a person full of leprosy ; He was 
quite as much at His ease with a purse-proud, 
ill-mannered Pharisee as with a blind beggar. 
No follower of His, eager to carry on His 
mission, can be either a snob, or one who pur- 
posely holds himself aloof from the rich. But 
in saying this, one should add that the utmost 
emphasis should be placed on our Lord's ob- 
jective in all of His social relationships ; it was 
never what He could get, always what He 
could give. It was this that made all com- 
panionships so safe for Him and so valuable 
to others. 

In considering how easily and naturally our 
Lord carried His message to all sorts and con- 
ditions of people, and with the same simple 
definiteness, it is well to remember that there 
was about Him, notwithstanding His broad so- 
cial sympathy and appeal, a very remarkable 
aloofness. No one but His enemies ever took 
any liberties with Jesus Christ, and then usu- 
ally to their discomfiture. His personal dig- 
nity was at times overwhelming. None of His 
intimates (no one except strangers and the in- 
sane) ever, so far as we know, called Him to 
His face by the sacred name "Jesus." Even 
in prayer He never identified Himself with 
His most intimate friends. He taught them 
to address God in the words "Our Father," 
but He never used that prayer with them, nor 
did He ever associate Himself with them in 

89 



The Church's Life 

prayer as one in similar need. People have a 
tendency to forget this sometimes, and to 
imagine that familiarity in addressing our 
Lord is an indication of their intimacy with 
Him. In the Gospels, quite the reverse is true. 
Another very marked feature of Christ's 
missionary activity was His teaching and train- 
ing of native workers. Of course it may have 
been merely the physical impossibility of cov- 
ering the ground Himself which made Him se- 
lect helpers, but I am quite sure that there was 
a deeper motive than that underlying that ac- 
tion. If the future Church was to be a living 
organism — the projection, in the world, of 
Christ Himself — a living witness to Him, car- 
rying on His message of life to the world — 
then there was need of men and women, not 
only to bear the message, but to transmit the 
life. In other words, provision had to be made 
then, provision must be made now, for the 
building up of a native Church instinct with 
the vitality of Christ Himself. It is not 
enough for even God Himself merely to be 
present in the world; His presence must be 
manifested and He Himself made known by 
and through His visible Body. Therefore our 
Lord trained these workers, and breathed into 
them the breath of life in order that, after the 
withdrawal of His visible presence, a visible 
Body might yet remain to perpetuate His life 
and to bear His message. Hence, too, the 
Church in these days and through her trained 

90 



The Model Missionary 

members goes to heathen lands; there trains 
native workers; there establishes a native 
Church — missionary because living; and 
thence, having accomplished her end, moves 
on to other lands, that she may preach there 
also, for to this end came she forth. 

Finally, and above all, our Lord was a Pray- 
ing missionary. Prayer was at the root of all 
His work; He planned nothing, He accom- 
plished nothing, without it. It was the need 
of this that He was continually trying to im- 
press upon His disciples. It was quite to be 
expected, therefore, that He should give them 
a prayer in which to express their fundamen- 
tal needs, and that those needs, when formu- 
lated in prayer, should be found to be those of 
a body of believers whose two-fold desire was 
the transformation of the world into the King- 
dom of God, and their own increasing fitness to 
further that transformation. 

It will be useful, therefore, to consider this 
great prayer if we are really to be missionaries 
in any true sense. It is found in its completest 
form in St. Matthew 6:9-13.* 

It will be noticed that the prayer consists of 
an address to God by name, followed by six 
petitions arranged in two groups. A mar- 
ginal note in the revised version of our Bible 
states that "many authorities, some ancient, 



* The following analysis of the Prayer is almost wholly that 
of Bishop Gore as given in his book, The Sermon on the 
Mount. 

91 



The Church's Life 

but with variations add" the closing ascription 
now in universal use except under certain 
liturgical conditions. The prayer may be ar- 
ranged graphically in a condensed form as fol- 
lows : 

Our Father in Heaven, 

Hallowed be thy namel • -. 
rp, i • j as m heaven 

Ihy kingdom come > ±u 

tu -iit j so on earth. 

Thy will be done J 

Give us daily bread. 
Forgive us our trespasses. 
Deliver us from the evil one: 
For thine is the Kingdom. 

But before taking up the different phrases 
of the prayer, let us consider certain general 
features. 

First, this prayer is not one among many; 
rather is it the model of all prayer, and the 
touchstone of efficacious prayer. "After this 
manner pray ye," says our Lord, and then He 
gives a perfect illustration of what all praying 
should be like. It is the model prayer because 
it is the great prayer "in the Name of Christ." 
We are prone to assume that a prayer "in 
Christ's Name" is made by appending those or 
similar words to one or more petitions. This 
is not so. Everywhere in the Bible "name" 
stands for "character." A prayer in Christ's 
name is a prayer in His character — that is, a 
prayer characteristic of Him and His desires. 

92 



The Model Missionary 

Since this is His own prayer, it is evidently the 
one most characteristic of Him; therefore it 
is the prayer in His Name and consequently its 
petitions are surely to be granted. This is not 
true of all our prayers. Often they are not at 
all such as our blessed Lord would have of- 
fered or for things which He would have de- 
sired. The disciples had always been accus- 
tomed to pray, yet the Master told them that 
they had never learned to pray in a manner 
characteristic of Him, that. is, in His Name; 
therefore their praying had never reached 
great heights of power. But as they grew into 
His likeness so they would learn to pray in 
His character and then they should receive the 
completeness of their joy (St. John 17:24). 

A simple illustration may serve to make 
more plain the meaning of "in Christ's Name" 
as applied to Prayer. A very rich friend of 
mine goes abroad, leaving me in charge of his 
affairs. He gives me unlimited power of at- 
torney, authorizing me to manage his affairs 
as, in my judgment, he would have managed 
them himself had he been here. Presently a 
request is made of my friend through me, in- 
volving a large draft on his funds. I decide 
that the request would have had his approval, 
I draw a cheque to my own or another's order, 
sign it with my friend's name, and present it 
at the bank to be cashed. The cashier asks by 
what authority I make this large draft and 
sign my friend's name to it. I show him my 

93 



The Church's Life 

power of attorney; he is satisfied that I am 
making the demand rightfully and the cash is 
handed over to me. The bank can do no other- 
wise. I have demanded the money in my 
friend's name, and I show the authority en- 
titling me to do so. So with prayer "in the 
Name of Christ." If we draw upon the re- 
sources of God in the Name of His Son, and 
can prove our authority to do so, our petition 
must be granted. "Whatsoever ye shall ask 
the Father in my name, he will give it you" 
(St. John 16:23). There is our power of attor- 
ney, and it is prefaced by the solemn assevera- 
tion of our Lord, "Verily, verily, I say unto 
you." But just as my friend's trust in me to 
the extent of giving me such authority in his 
name makes it incumbent on me to consider 
with the utmost care how I exercise that au- 
thority, lest I use it in a way or for a purpose 
not wholly in accord with his desires as known 
to me, so in the case of prayer. It is taking a 
tremendous responsibility to attach to any pe- 
tition the significant words "in the Name of 
Christ." I can only do so if I am absolutely 
assured that that particular prayer is charac- 
teristic of Him, that it expresses a desire of 
which He would fully approve. The very as- 
surance that it will be granted makes the form 
and matter of the petition an affair requiring 
most careful thought. It is for this reason, 
doubtless, that our Lord, on another occasion, 
suggests the advisability of consulting with 

94 



The Model Missionary 

some other Christian before deciding so impor- 
tant a question (St. Matt. 18:19). In the 
Lord's Prayer, however, this need not trouble 
us. It is supremely the prayer in His Name, 
the petitions are characteristic of Him, they 
all express what He ardently desires; there- 
fore we can offer them in the certainty that 
they will be granted. This, then, is the first 
thing to be noted about the Lord's Prayer: 
It is the prayer supremely characteristic of the 
Lord Himself, therefore it is the prayer of ef- 
ficacy — the test and model of all acceptable 
prayer. Our petitions bring power only in so 
far as they are evidently consistent with the 
petitions of this prayer. "The climax of 
Christian growth is to have thoroughly learned 
to say the Lord's Prayer in the spirit of Him 
who first spoke it."* 

The second general point to note regarding 
the prayer is the order of its petitions. The 
things of God come first; those pertaining to 
ourselves, second. This is the reflection of 
Christ's mind and desires. Ours are usually 
the reverse. Too often really earnest prayer 
is, with us, a last resort, to be used only when 
driven to it by critical personal need. Then 
the personal desire looms large and takes first 
place. Not so with the prayer put on our lips 
by Christ. Prayer in His Name and, for that 
reason, issuing with power and bringing peace 



* Gore. Loc. cit., page 130. 
95 



The Church's Life 

and joy, is prayer which puts first things first. 
That is the rule and order for all our praying. 

Thirdly, we are to note the social character 
of the prayer. Nowhere are we permitted to 
say "my" or "me." Everywhere it is "our," 
"us." It is the prayer of all Christians for all 
Christians. Only as we realize ourselves m 
need, but one with all of God's family in that 
need, can we really use the Lord's Prayer. It 
will be found of great value to use this prayer 
from time to time as a meditation, repeating 
each phrase in order, slowly and thoughtfully, 
pausing after each phrase to let God make its 
meaning clear to us. 

Think now of the address. "Our Father." 
It is to the Father of the family on the part of 
the children of the family. It is not intended 
for the use of all men indiscriminately, but 
was given to God's own children as a special 
privilege, and for their peculiar use. This 
seems apparent from St. Matthew's account of 
the circumstances under which it was given. 
It occurs in the "Sermon on the Mount" — an 
address made primarily to the disciples though 
in the presence of a multitude of other people 
(St. Matt. 5:1, 2). In the happy phrase of 
Bishop Gore, the Sermon "was preached in the 
ear of the Church and was overheard by the 
world." This explains much. 

The members of the family are taught to call 
God their Father. This is a right which they 
alone have, and they are given it only by virtue 

96 



The Model Missionary 

of their relation to and union with the only- 
begotten Son, Jesus Christ (St. John 1:12). 
To them, the Holy Spirit reveals God as their 
Father (Rom. 8:14-16). It is only to those 
who desire and claim sonship that the "Father- 
hood of God" becomes a practical reality. 

In passing, it might be noted that the word 
"brother" throughout the New Testament ap- 
pears to be limited to members of the Christian 
community. Our Lord's practice seems to 
have been in conformity with this principle. 
"All ye are brethren," Jie says to His disci- 
ples ; but when He inculcates the duties of the 
Christian toward one who has not yet accepted 
the privileges of sonship in God's family, He 
applies to such the word "neighbor." His an- 
swer to the question of the lawyer, "Who is 
my neighbor?" is a good illustration (St. Luke 
10:29-37). Had one of His disciples asked 
him, "Who is my brother?" the answer would 
doubtless have been different. 

"Father" is a name of great significance in 
human relationships ; to be permitted to apply 
it to God Almighty is an inexpressible priv- 
ilege. A child seeks in its father wisdom, 
power and love. Any one of the three alone 
— wisdom unmitigated by love and power; 
power exerted apart from, wisdom and love; 
love unguided by wisdom and power — these 
present only a hideous nightmare of possibili- 
ties. The three qualities are essential to pro- 
duce confidence. The most perfect of earthly 

97 



The Church's Life 

parents presents but the barest approximation 
to these true qualities of fatherhood. God 
exhibits them in infinite perfectness. The 
members of God's family are in the hands and 
under the care of a Father all-wise, all-power- 
ful and all-loving. He can make no mistakes 
in the treatment of His children through ig- 
norance, weakness or carelessness. 

"Who art in Heaven." It is childish to 
think of heaven as a place up in the sky where 
God lives. There is no route to heaven 
through space. One does not have to die to 
get there. 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 
He sees it in his joy; 



At length the man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

Only as we grow up and lose our childlike- 
ness, only as we lose our faith in the unseen, 
do we become conscious of a thickening veil 
between earth and heaven. Really they are 
two interpenetrating realms, and it is not dif- 
ficult for the child of God to dwell much in 
his "Father's house." Heaven is where God 
is, and God is very close to any one desiring 
Him so to be. 

98 



The Model Missionary 

"Speak to Him, thou, for He heareth, 
And spirit with spirit can meet, 
Closer is He than breathing, 
Nearer than hands and feet." 

Just on the other side of the veil God dwells. 
His realm is there — the realm of power and 
calm. To some of God's children, whose senses 
have become attuned through long practice 
to catch the echoes and images of things un- 
seen, the veil is always semi-transparent ; to all 
of us it is so at times. 

There stands upon the altar a bit of bread, 
a drop of wine; a power from God's realm 
touches these material elements; their value is 
changed; and what we receive is not merely 
material food fit for our bodies, but spiritual 
food to nourish our souls. Indeed, in this 
great Sacrament, our Lord comes to us and we 
to Him ; we are actually in His presence ; here 
the veil is so thin that through it His power 
works almost without obstruction and "to our 
great and endless comfort." 

This is but one assurance of the close pres- 
ence of God. Where God is manifest, there is 
heaven, — the realm of peace and light and 
power. Through the gate of worship we can 
enter heaven at any time by realizing the pres- 
ence of God; by the practice of His presence 
we come to dwell there. 

"Hallowed be Thy Name!' In heaven the 
object of all reverence and adoration is the 
Name — the character — of God. It is a proper 

99 



The Church's Life 

instinct by which the devout Jew never pre- 
sumes to pronounce the great Name of God 
— Jehovah — the Ever-Existent. Our Lord 
teaches us to pray that we may ourselves real- 
ize the adorable qualities of God — His holiness, 
His justice, His love ; that reverence for Him, 
because of these qualities, may become the con- 
trolling feature of our religion; that we may 
strive to reproduce those qualities in our- 
selves ; and that more and more the reverence 
which is paid to God and to His essential char- 
acter in heaven may be duplicated on earth. 
For scholars tell us that the phrase "as in 
heaven so on earth" is to be taken as qualify- 
ing all three of the preceding clauses. Every 
act or word, therefore, indeed every thought 
of ours which adds to the reverence in which 
God's name and character are held among our 
associates here on earth, helps on the fulfil- 
ment of this prayer, "Hallowed be Thy 
Name." 

"Thy Kingdom come — on earth as in 
heaven" Reverence is expressed in adora- 
tion, but not only so. It is no passive quality. 
The most profound reverence is expressed in 
active strivings to pattern ourselves after the 
person reverenced, or to reproduce his charac- 
teristic qualities. (One recalls the familiar 
saying, "Imitation is the sincerest flattery.") 
Therefore when we have prayed that God's 
character may be revered on earth as it is in 
heaven, we are led immediately to pray that 

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The Model Missionary 

His righteousness (a word which, better than 
any other, seems to sum up His character) 
may appear to all men everywhere so wholly 
beautiful and adorable that they may desire 
ardently to show their admiration and rever- 
ence not only by emulating it, but also by plac- 
ing themselves under God's rule and author- 
ity, and by giving to Him their utter obedi- 
ence. And note here that righteousness and 
morality are not the same thing at all. As a 
recent writer has said, "Morality may be the 
long story of human behavior; but righteous- 
ness is divine. The hope of righteousness in 
the world is that the Creator is the Judge" 
(C. S. Baldwin, in The Living Church, April 
3, 1920. Cf. Acts 17:31; Rom. 3:5, 6). This 
recognition of the supreme claim of God to 
universal loyalty is the coming of God's King- 
dom on earth; and every act of ours, however 
slight, which tends to make others realize the 
attractiveness of God's character, and which 
therefore stirs a desire to imitate it and makes 
goodness easier and sin more difficult and life 
richer for some one else, helps forward the 
coming of the Kingdom of heaven on earth; for 
it is quite as true that where God reigns there 
is heaven as that where heaven is there God 
reigns. When, through the sum of such slight 
individual efforts, mankind as a whole comes 
so to reverence God's righteousness as to imi- 
tate it in all their inter-relationships, the reign 
of God, now established in the heavenly sphere, 

101 



The Church's Life 

will be manifestly extended to include the 
whole earthly sphere as well. 

"Thy will be done — as in heaven, so on 
earth" In heaven — in the realm on the other 
side of the veil, God's holy will is perfectly ful- 
filled and joyously accepted. There is no 
other desire, for His will is seen to be the high- 
est good both in itself and in the ways in which 
it is fulfilled. Here, in the earthly realm, 
these ways can not but be equally inspired and 
directed by the pure love of our Father; but, 
too often the fulfilment of God's will is ac- 
companied by such painful circumstances that 
the splendid prayer, "Thy will be done," has 
come to be a common expression of more or 
less pious resignation. Of course this is due 
to our own short-sightedness. If we could 
see the ultimate results attained by God in 
completely working out His will in and through 
us, we would be astounded that ever for a mo- 
ment we should have desired otherwise. So 
far from being reserved for moments of pain 
and sorrow, whispered in a minor key, and 
made expressive of resignation to the inev- 
itable, the words should be shouted aloud as 
the C major of our lives — the highest conceiv- 
able good, glorifying and illuminating every 
event. For nothing that comes to us by the 
will of God can be evil, and nothing evil can 
come to us by the will of God. "We know that 
to them that love God, all things work together 
for good" (Rom. 8:28). Those four mono- 

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The Model Missionary- 
syllables — "Thy will be done" — are perhaps the 
most complete expression of man's longing for 
happiness and contentment that has ever been 
put into human speech. Their perfect fulfil- 
ment on earth as in heaven would leave noth- 
ing more to be desired in the whole universe. 
Every joyous acceptance of what comes to us 
through the love and power and wisdom of our 
Father makes His will more completely done 
on earth as in heaven. 

This then is the mission to which we new- 
born people — members of God's family — are 
devoted: to increase everywhere and by every 
means the reverence in which God and His at- 
tributes of majesty, righteousness, wisdom, 
justice, power and love are held; that all men 
may loyally acknowledge His authority and 
strive to emulate His character, in order that 
His kingdom of righteousness may be estab- 
lished throughout the world, His will recog- 
nized as man's highest good, and earth become 
like heaven. 

For the accomplishment of this great mis- 
sion we need certain things, and our Lord bids 
us pray for them. They are personal needs 
but they are to be interpreted in relation to the 
united work of the Family and of the world's 
needs. 

"Give us this day our daily bread/' First, 
we need physical strength for our work, and 
therefore need bodily food. But note the re- 
strained desire expressed in the petition. No 

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The Church's Life 

doubt our Lord uses the word "bread" in a 
typical sense, meaning all things necessary to 
our physical life; but He certainly means only 
necessary things; in other words, only such 
things as are essential to the doing of our work 
effectively. Moreover, the form of the peti- 
tion is in the original, very striking. The pre- 
cise meaning is obscure, but the more literal 
translation seems to be, "Give us today the 
bread for the coming day." Not only is the 
request limited to the simplest food and other 
necessities of life, but it is limited also to our 
immediate need. While, on the one hand, we 
are thus limited, in our asking, to bare neces- 
sities, we may be quite sure, on the other, that 
these will never be lacking, or our Lord would 
not have told us to ask unconditionally for 
them. David was a person of very wide ex- 
perience among people of all sorts, yet he tes- 
tifies that in all his varied career, from be- 
ginning to end, he had never come across a 
case of absolute destitution in the family of a 
righteous man who took God at His word. 
Doubtless he was perfectly right. Absolute 
and unwavering trust in God can never be dis- 
regarded by Him. Furthermore we pray, 
"Give us" not "Give me." In praying for bod- 
ily needs we are to have in mind the whole of 
God's Family — all of our fellow-Christians; 
and we shall not expect to be provided for in- 
dividually unless we are doing our best to see 
that all other members of God's Family are 

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The Model Missionary 

equally provided for, and protected from want. 

"And forgive us our debts as zue also have 
forgiven our debtors" We have prayed for 
physical strength through the supply of ma- 
terial food. But something more is required 
if we are to do God's work and fulfil our mis- 
sion acceptably. For this we need spiritual 
food to give strength to our souls. Those 
souls are lamentably weak. They have never 
been strong enough to bring our bodies com- 
pletely under control; we have constantly of- 
fended God in His purity, His love, His jus- 
tice ; we have not tried hard enough to be like 
Him; measured by the rule of Christ's life, 
ours are manifestly crooked. Therefore for- 
giveness for past offenses is absolutely essen- 
tial to any access of spiritual strength. That 
is the reason why forms of confession and ab- 
solution are found at the very opening of all 
liturgies. We have defrauded God of the 
obedience which was His due and have thereby 
become His debtors ; we have broken His laws 
and thereby become trespassers against Him; 
whether as debtors or trespassers we have done 
Him a wrong and can only throw ourselves 
on His mercy. 

Note also the extent to which we may ex- 
pect mercy. It is measured by the degree of 
our forgiveness toward others — "forgive us 
. . . as we forgive" (i. e. in the same propor- 
tion) (C/. St. Matt. 6:15). If we would 
know how forgivingly God feels toward us, 

105 



The Church's Life 

all that is necessary is to see how forgivingly 
we feel — not spasmodically or upon some spe- 
cial occasion, but habitually — toward people 
who have done us wrong. It is a very solemn 
petition, involving great issues. 

"And bring us not into temptation, but de- 
liver us from the evil one." Of all the clauses 
of the Lord's Prayer, the meaning of this one 
is the easiest to understand and the most dif- 
ficult to express. St. James, using the same 
word for "temptation," tells us to rejoice in it 
as a test of faith (Jas. 1:2), and indeed it is 
only by subjecting strength to a strain that 
it is increased. Evidently, however, no one 
desires strength or resistance to be tested to 
the breaking point unless the material is re- 
garded as worth wasting in order to determine 
that point. Of course that is not so in this 
case. What our Lord means us to feel and ex- 
press is our well-known and deplorable weak- 
ness in the face of temptation. We daren't 
pray to be put to the test ; in fact we may even 
pray not to be tested, at least not beyond our 
strength or unless at the same time the spirit 
of watchfulness and prayer be increased in us 
so that we are "delivered from evil" (liter- 
ally, "from the evil one") (Cf. St. Matt. 
26:41). As Bishop Gore has explained (The 
Sermon on the Mount, p. 128), "The prayer 
may be interpreted by expansion thus: make 
us watchful and prayerful, so that we may 
never be suffered to fall into temptation as into 

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The Model Missionary 

a snare." For deliverance under such cir- 
cumstances we may always pray with confi- 
dence (Cf. i Cor. 10:13). 

The second portion of this clause is for de- 
liverance from the devil — not temporarily but 
permanently. We are reminded of the clause 
in the Litany so often misread by our clergy: 
"And finally to beat down Satan under our 
feet," where "finally" doesn't have the mean- 
ing of "eventually" or "at last," but rather of 
"definitively," "now, once for all." So, 
strengthened in body and soul, forgiven for all 
past offences, at one with God, knowing our 
desperate susceptibility to evil suggestions but 
knowing also that by watchfulness and prayer 
Satan can be resisted, we go forth on our mis- 
sion. 

And here again it is necessary to notice that 
these petitions have no merely individual ap- 
plication. Intercession — the praying for oth- 
ers, those not yet re-born, as well as our fellow- 
members in God's family — this should form, 
a large part of all our prayers. 

There can be no question about the result. 
St. John, on the Island of Patmos, looking for- 
ward into the dim future, saw the end with 
such absolute certitude that to his eyes it 
seemed already present. "There followed 
great voices in heaven," he writes, "and they 
said, The kingdom of the world is become the 
kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ" 
(Rev. 11:15). So, some time after the Lord's 

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The Church's Life 

Prayer was written down, the mind of the 
Church attached to the prayer a doxology 
which was commonly used in connection with 
many prayers, but has a peculiarly fine sig- 
nificance here. For not only does it give the 
reason for our worship of God, but, with su- 
perb assurance, it sees the ultimate purpose of 
God as already definitely realized. "Thine is 
the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for 
ever and ever. Amen!' Here is the source 
of all our confidence. In weakness and inef- 
ficiency the Church struggles forward; but 
around her is God Almighty ; unseen, unknown 
by the world but infinite in power and glory 
and determined to establish on earth His king- 
dom of righteousness, yet dependent on man 
for the accomplishment of His purpose. To 
this high purpose He calls us, and He pledges 
His honor that, with our cooperation, mankind 
shall be brought in adoration to His throne. 
Surely if the messages implied in this great 
Prayer fail to stir in us a passionate eagerness 
to make them known, something is fatally 
wrong with us. God has become our Father ; 
we have entered upon a relationship toward 
Him possible for every son of man. In close 
fellowship with Him, we have found heaven 
where He dwells as others may find it here and 
now. In striving to reproduce His holy char- 
acter in ourselves and in others, righteousness 
appears on earth. In the perfect fulfilment of 
His most glorious will on earth, we find satis- 

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The Model Missionary 

faction for ourselves and all mankind. We 
have learned that only as a world divided, dis- 
tressed, and misled comes to recognize Him as 
King can the law of right and justice be finally 
established on earth. We have found our- 
selves to be the objects of His daily loving 
care. Conscious of the debt we owe Him, we 
are assured of His forgiveness; more than 
that, we are made confident of deliverance 
from the powers of evil. For He is the King, 
all-powerful, and glorious beyond imagining. 



109 



CHAPTER V 

THE GREAT CHARTER OF THE CHURCH 

So long as Jesus Christ was Himself phys- 
ically present in the world it was not difficult 
for Him to show men that He came with a 
message of life from God to man. We have 
seen how, with untiring activity, He carried 
that message, applying it to the bodies, the 
minds and the souls of all whom He could 
reach. Even as a child He was plainly con- 
scious of a mission. Unconsciously, too, He 
ministered through those passive early years. 
We have studied the methods which He 
adopted during His active missionary career; 
and, because all His strength seems to have 
been derived from God through prayer, and 
also because every clause of the great prayer 
which He gave to His Church is instinct with 
the missionary message and has but little sig- 
nificance apart from it, we have tried to see 
what the prayer means. 

As the time approached when Christ was to 
withdraw His physical presence, it became in- 
creasingly necessary to make some provision 
for the carrying on of His mission. 

There is an old legend to the effect that when 
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The Great Charter of the Church 

our Lord ascended to heaven after His earthly 
ministry was over, He was met by an angel 
who asked Him where He had been. "I have 
been to earth/' He replied. "What hast Thou 
done there ?" asked the angel. "I have set up 
my Kingdom," was the reply. "What dost 
Thou hope for it?" the angel asked. "That 
all the world shall be brought into it through 
its present citizens," said Christ. "And how 
many citizens hast Thou made?" pursued the 
angel. "About six score," was the reply. The 
angel paused a moment, wondering. Then — 
"And with this paltry number, how canst Thou 
hope to conquer the world? Suppose they 
prove false or disobedient; what other provi- 
sion hast Thou made?" "I have made no 
other provision," was the calm reply ; "I am de- 
pending on them" 

How our Lord's dependence upon the citi- 
zens of His Kingdom in those early days was 
justified, we can read in the whole history of 
the early Church for two centuries. How far 
His reliance upon His Church today is justi- 
fied, depends on how you and I interpret His 
final command, and on the zeal with which you 
and I are trying to obey it. He has made no 
other provision to have a work done which you 
and I alone can accomplish, and to secure re- 
sults dependent upon your message and mine. 
For this He is depending solely on us. 

It was enough to cause the keenest anxiety 
to a mind less faithful and well-poised. He 

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The Church's Life 

trusted in two things; the gradual fruition of 
His own teaching, and the coming of the Holy 
Spirit into the Church to abide with it as 
teacher and director. We shall see later what 
absolute reliance He placed on the work of God 
the Holy Ghost, and how fully He was justi- 
fied; but during the closing months of our 
Lord's earthly life, the teaching and strength- 
ening power of God had not yet come in full- 
ness on the disciples, and until it should come 
they were weak, inefficient, timid and igno- 
rant. They were, however, the only instru- 
ments at hand and they had at least one essen- 
tial quality of the missionary — intense love for 
their Master, and hence the spirit to do His will 
and obey His last commands, however weak 
the flesh. 

But before proceeding to discuss what these 
provisions were, let us see whether our Lord 
really considered His mission as world-wide 
in possible scope, and His message as applica- 
ble to all men everywhere. 

We have already seen how God regarded 
His revelation of Himself to the Jewish 
Church. There can be no question but that He 
intended the Jews to carry even that incom- 
plete revelation as good news to all the world, 
that so all nations might be brought into obedi- 
ence to His righteous rule; and mere logic 
would lead us to conclude that, with the giving 
of a complete revelation to the Christian 
Church, God equally intended that Church to 

112 



The Great Charter of the Church 

be His final messenger to the whole known 
world. But let us see briefly what Jesus Christ 
Himself and His immediate followers thought 
about it. It is certainly true that, at first, our 
Lord did place limitations upon the scope of 
His own mission and that of His disciples. 
This is apparent in the explicit directions which 
He gave to the Twelve (St. Matt. 10:5-6); 
it is implied in the later mission of the Sev- 
enty (St. Luke 10:1). He states, at least on 
one occasion, that His own mission is simi- 
larly restricted (St. Matt. 15:24). In view, 
however, of the whole trend of our Lord's 
teaching, such a restriction must have been 
only temporary, and must be otherwise ex- 
plainable than on the theory that the final rev- 
elation of God was intended for the Jew only. 
It may have been that the desire to see the Jew- 
ish people fulfilling their mission was still so 
ardent in the heart of Christ, that He deter- 
mined to disregard their age-long indifference 
to it, to start afresh, and to give them one more 
opportunity. He knew that, in the plan of 
God, salvation was of the Jews; it was, indeed, 
His own to whom He came; by His own that 
He was rejected (St. John 1 :i 1 ) ; the Kingdom 
of God was theirs by right of priority, if only 
they would be faithful to it (St. Matt. 21 :43). 
Not until every effort had been made, and 
all in vain, to open their blind eyes and arouse 
their sluggish hearts, did that bitter cry of 
disappointed hope burst from our Lord's lips, 

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The Church's Life 

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the 
prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto 
her ! Behold, your house is left unto you deso- 
late" (St. Matt. 23:37, 38). A similar hope 
stirred His Apostles ; a like disappointment met 
them. St. Peter is convinced that the prom- 
ises of God are primarily to the Jews (Acts 
3 125, 26) ; and even the great Apostle to the 
Gentiles never fails to address his message 
first to Jewish gatherings in synagogues, on the 
ground that it is necessary that the word of 
God should first be spoken to them for it is to 
them first that the Gospel is to be exhibited as 
"the power of God unto salvation" \Rom. 
1:16). Only as the Jew rejects the revela- 
tion and scorns the message and its obliga- 
tions does God divert His messengers from 
the Jew to the Gentile, and select the latter as 
His agent (St. Matt. 21:43; Acts 13:46; 
and 18:6). Is not this the reason why our 
Lord at first restricted the scope of His own 
mission ? His object may not at all have been 
to confine the message within bounds, but 
rather to present to God's proper messengers, 
once more and for the last time, an opportu- 
nity to fulfil their destiny. That the disciples 
were at first similarly restricted in the scope 
of their mission may be explained on the same 
grounds. I like to think also, however, that 
our blessed Lord, having due regard to their 
unprepared condition, knew that it would be 
easier for them to be sent to their own kind 

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The Great Charter of the Church 

of people; especially since He intended to fol- 
low them up in order to correct any mistakes 
they might make either through ignorance or 
excessive zeal. Moreover, their mental limita- 
tions were such that they could not safely be 
entrusted with a message to the keener Gen- 
tile mind. That had to wait for the appear- 
ance of a Saul. 

Such, I think, are the reasons for our Lord's 
apparent restrictions of His mission. That 
He was not Himself bound by them, however, 
is quite plain. The woman of Samaria, the 
Syro-Phoenician mother, the Roman centurion 
whose favorite slave was sick, the Greek prose- 
lytes at the last great Passover whose request 
to Philip, "Sir, we would see Jesus," evoked the 
triumphant exclamation, "The hour is come, 
that the Son of Man should be glorified," — all 
of these were, racially at least, Gentiles, and 
to all of them our Lord ministered of His 
abundant grace. Indeed, to the Samaritan 
woman, a Gentile and a sinner, he revealed the 
higher truths of God even as He did to Nico- 
demus, the devout Pharisee. When we come 
to His explicit statements regarding the scope 
of His mission, and the appeal of His message, 
there is no hint of any limitation whatever. 
"God loved the world'' is His conviction; 
"Whosoever believeth" receives life (St. John 
3:16). "The bread which I will give is my 
flesh, for the life of the world" (St. John 6: 
51). "I am the light of the world" (St. John 

115 



The Church's Life 

8:12). "Other sheep I have — them also I 
must bring" (St. John 10:16). "I, if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto myself" (St. 
John 12 132). "I came to save the world" (St. 
John 12:47). 

Redemption of the whole creation and sal- 
vation made possible for all men are the objec- 
tives of the incarnation of the Son of God, and 
when He prays for the unity of all the new- 
born children of God, then and throughout all 
time, it is in order that, through their mani- 
fest unity, one with another and all in the 
Father and the Son together, the world may 
be convinced that in Jesus Christ is seen the 
Revealer of God (St. John 17:21). 

By His command, His messengers are sent 
forth to make disciples ofy and to baptize all 
nations (St. Matt. 28:19). The Gospels are 
the records of a great Missionary; they were 
written by missionaries. The book following 
the Gospels in the canon records the acts of 
living men engaged in turning the world up- 
side down ; bringing in a new social order, not, 
as in the case of man's blind and misguided 
attempts, by hatred and destruction, but by 
the divine method of love and freedom and 
life for all the world. The very center and 
kernel of the book is found in its opening chap- 
ter : "Ye shall receive power" (Acts 1 :8). The 
remainder is the record of this power as ap- 
plied to the known world of the day. St. Peter 
has a narrow range of activities — Judaea, 

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The Great Charter of the Church 

Samaria, Galilee — all Jewish or part Jewish — 
though he is given proof that the Spirit shall 
yet be poured out on all flesh. St. Philip's 
mission opens the gateway to a Gentile people 
far beyond his ken. But it is to the missionary 
activities of St. Paul — ambassador plenipo- 
tentiary of God to the whole Gentile world, 
East and West — that two-thirds of this mar- 
velous book is devoted. Unable thoroughly to 
cover the vast field of their activities, the great 
missionaries of the early Church have recourse 
to letters; the note of every one of the Epistles 
is personal responsibility toward keeping and 
extending the Faith. The canon of Scripture 
closes with the lifting of the veil which hides 
the future. Strange visions appear, confused 
images succeed one another, voices and thun- 
derings are heard, colossal shapes of doom and 
destruction appear and disappear through the 
mists; the mind strives in vain to grasp and 
hold the meaning of it all. Yet out of the 
confusion of image and allegory, like the sun 
bursting through clouds, emerge from time to 
time distinct visions of what shall be, promises 
revealing the consummation of the determinate 
counsel of God. Around the throne of the 
Almighty stand the elect of Israel; and with 
them a countless host of the redeemed from 
all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, 
joining with the hosts of heaven in united 
fealty to God (Rev. 7:9-12). Great voices 
announce the transformation of all earthly rule 

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The Church's Life 

into the everlasting Kingdom of Christ (Rev. 
11:15). Through the arches of heaven rever- 
berate, like the roar of mighty waters in flood, 
the praises of Jehovah — the Almighty King 
(Rev. 19:6). And at the last, we see the river 
of living water springing from the throne of 
God; and, on either side, that tree of life whose 
leaves are for the healing of the nations (Rev. 
22:2). Here is the perfect fulfillment of God's 
eternal purpose for man ; expressed in the be- 
ginning, awaiting man's own consent through 
the ages, and now at last completed through 
the perfect obedience of the Son of Man. For 
in another garden once stood the tree of life, 
mercifully guarded from access by a flaming 
sword lest man, condemned to mortality 
through his sin of disobedience, should eat of 
it and live for ever in his guilty state (Gen. 
3:22-24). Now, through the obedience of the 
perfect Son of Man, the tree of life stands free 
to all who are made one with Him; its leaves 
spread abroad for the healing of the nations. 
"And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. 
And he that heareth, let him say, Come. And 
he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, 
let him take the water of life freely" (Rev. 
22 : 17) . This is the news for which the nations 
wait. Not believe in the world-wide mission 
of the Church? Alas, poor blinded Christian! 
God's eternal plan can never miscarry; but 
how will it be with you at the last, if you have 
declined all part in its accomplishment — if you 

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The Great Charter of the Church 

have said to no single thirsty soul, "Come"? 
* * * 

The last words of a departing teacher and 
leader of men are, I suppose, always of peculiar 
significance to his followers. At any rate they 
were so in this case. Years afterwards, four 
of His followers — two of them His own or- 
dained Apostles, and the other two relying 
upon information received from an Apostle or 
a member of His earthly family — put into writ- 
ing all that the Holy Spirit (according to His 
promise) called to their remembrance concern- 
ing His acts and sayings (Cf. St. John 14:26). 
Of the first thirty years of Christ's earthly life 
they had but little to record. St. Luke, deriv- 
ing his information probably from the Blessed 
Virgin, narrates the events leading up to and 
accompanying our Lord's birth, and His visit 
to Jerusalem, at the age of twelve. St. Mat- 
thew gives, in addition, the visit of the eastern 
seers, the attempt on the Child's life, and the 
flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. St. 
Mark, the earliest of the recorders, depending 
much, doubtless, upon what was told him by 
his old friend, Simon Peter, is silent regarding 
the whole of our Lord's life up to the time of 
His baptism. St. John is not concerned with 
historical or biographical detail, but records 
and interprets the Master's sayings with ex- 
traordinarily sympathetic accuracy and under- 
standing. 

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The Church's Life 

One other period of our Lord's life is left 
almost equally unrecorded — that is, the period 
of the forty days succeeding the Resurrection. 
Much instruction must have been crowded into 
this period, countless sayings must have been 
uttered (Cf. St. John 21 125). They were His 
final instructions — His last words; and one 
would have expected to find them very fully 
recorded. It is not so, however. St. Matthew 
and St. Mark have little to say regarding this 
period. St. Luke and St. John give only the 
briefest records of certain appearances of our 
Lord during those forty days and of the say- 
ings associated with them. It is as if, with one 
notable exception, the last sayings had been 
forgotten or had made little impression. That 
one exception must have been emphasized in 
some extraordinary way, and it evidently left 
a profound impression on their minds; for, 
years afterwards, when the evangelists attempt 
to recall the events of those forty days, only 
this one saying remains so vividly in their 
minds that all four of them, writing indepen- 
dently, record it — one of them twice over. 

This is the Great Commission of the Church 
— our Lord's provision for the continuance of 
His own mission. The form given by St. Mat- 
thew is probably the most familiar: "Go ye 
tlierefore, and make disciples of all the nations, 
baptizing them into the name of the Father and 
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; teaching 
them to observe all things whatsoever I com- 

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The Great Charter of the Church 

manded you" (St. Matt. 28:19, 20). This is 
an expansion of the command as recorded by 
St. Mark: "Go ye into all the world, and preach 
the gospel to the whole creation" (St. Mark 
16:15). But all four evangelists record it: 
St. Matthew 28:18-20; St. Mark 16:15; St. 
Luke 24:46-49; St. John 20:21. St. Luke 
records it a second time in Acts 1 :8. 

Now this universal recording is very re- 
markable, for it is not found in the case of any 
of the great events of our Lord's life, even 
those which have become enshrined for all time 
in the dogmatic utterances of the Church. We 
find no such unanimous record of the Birth, the 
Baptism, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, 
or the Ascension. The Resurrection alone ap- 
pears to be regarded as of parallel significance 
and to receive similar recognition; and this is 
surely noteworthy, since without our Lord's 
permanent and decisive triumph over death, 
as proved by His Resurrection, there would 
have been no assurance of life to form the 
substance of the Church's message. The two 
are intimately bound up together — without the 
Resurrection there would have been no mes- 
sage worth delivering; without the message 
there would have been for us no assurance of 
immortality. No wonder, therefore, that from 
the tantalizing silence of the forty days, there 
sounds the four- fold trumpet-call — "Go ye"! 
It is the supreme thing — the message of life 
proven and assured — the commission to the 

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The Church's Life 

Church always and everywhere. She may for- 
get all else, even her Creeds ; but this she may 
not forget except at peril of her own life. 

Note another emphasis on the Great Com- 
mission. One man destined to be an Apostle 
was not present when the commission was 
given ; in fact, so far as we know, he had never 
even seen our Lord. When this man is called, 
it is deemed necessary that he, too, receive the 
commission from the same source as did the 
original messengers. It will be to him at once 
the assurance of his membership in the Church 
and of his responsibility toward the world. So 
on the burning road to Damascus he sees the 
Lord Christ, and from, those lips he receives 
the commission : "To this end have I appeared 
unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a 
witness; . . . delivering thee . . . from the 
Gentiles, unto whom I send thee" (Acts 26: 
16, 17). Now whether we conceive of the 
Church as a human organization — inspired by 
God, it may be, both in its inception and con- 
tinuance, but still analogous to a guild or a 
club or a society; or whether we regard it as 
a divine organism — a living body — composed 
of members united together by an indestruc- 
tible bond of common life from a common 
source — in a word, as the Body of Christ — 
whichever of these two views we accept, one 
thing is perfectly certain. An organization 
having an officially recognized standing and 
purpose must comply with the terms of its 

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The Great Charter of the Church 

charter. The charter is issued by authority, 
and it sets forth the conditions under which 
the organization is licensed to do business and 
the object for which it is incorporated. The 
organization is formed to fulfill some purpose 
which the State or other authority acknowl- 
edges to be a useful one, and the moment the 
organization forgets this obligation and fails 
to fulfill the purpose for which it was incor- 
porated, as set forth in its charter, that moment 
it becomes liable to the withdrawal of its char- 
ter, and to consequent dissolution. That this 
result is possible in the case of the Church is 
abundantly evident. The Jewish Church for- 
feited its charter because it was blind to its 
mission as a messenger of God to all the world; 
a similar fate has always threatened the Chris- 
tian Church (see St. Matt. 21:43 and Rev. 
2:5). And what is true of the whole organiza- 
tion is true of any member of it. A member 
who deliberately disregards the purpose for 
which his society was organized and chartered 
thereby becomes, at the least, a useless and 
negligible member and may even be cut off 
from the privileges of membership altogether. 
If one tries to discover the Church's charter 
or act of incorporation, it would obviously be 
looked for in some outstanding statement on 
the part of its supreme Head, addressed to the 
whole society immediately before its organiza- 
tion. Such a statement we actually do find in, 
and only in, the Great Commission. Even if, 

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The Church's Life 

then, we think of the Church as merely a 
divinely inspired human organization, disre- 
gard of Jesus Christ's final command, whether 
by the Church as a whole or by any individual 
member of it, involves very serious conse- 
quences. This is not a remarkably high mo- 
tive, I grant — fear of consequences never is; 
but it is a motive. To risk forfeiting a share 
in the mercies of God, covenanted or uncov- 
enanted, is a very hazardous proceeding; to 
minimize or misinterpret our Lord's last com- 
mand is a very disloyal one. If we conceive 
of the Church as an organism — the Body of 
Christ — representing Him here on earth, 
carrying on His life and work; and we our- 
selves as "very members incorporate" in that 
Body, surely the function of every Christian 
is perfectly evident. The supreme objective of 
every living organism is to propagate its spe- 
cies by the handing on of its own life. Every- 
thing is adapted to that end; nature exhibits 
the most astonishing ingenuity in attaining 
that end. An organism unfitted to reproduce 
is an abnormal thing; one unwilling to repro- 
duce falls short, as a rule, of its highest pur- 
pose. Self-preservation and reproduction are 
the two dominant factors in the organic world ; 
and, of the two, the latter is possibly the more 
deep-seated and inherent. That is, the instinct 
to hand on the collective life, rather than the 
mere fear of losing individual life, is probably 
at the root of the instinct of self-preservation. 

124 



The Great Charter of the Church 

Apply this to the spiritual organism — the 
Church. The Church was born and put into 
the world to act as Christ did ; to serve as He 
served; to proclaim, by life and word, a mes- 
sage from God as He proclaimed it ; but, above 
all, to transmit the more abundant life which 
she has received from the living God in Christ. 
So you and I were made members of Christ in 
Baptism for one main purpose only — to hand 
on to others the life which we have received so 
abundantly, whether it be physical, mental, or 
spiritual. For this reason we pray, as pre- 
viously noted, "God be merciful unto us and 
bless us, (in order) that Thy way may be 
known upon earth, Thy saving health among 
all nations." Whenever we ignore our mis- 
sionary, life-giving calling, and to the extent 
that we ignore it, we cut ourselves off from 
the living Body of Christ, or, if not cut off, we 
become useless and possibly a menace to its 
health. 

Of course if we regard ourselves as purely 
individual Christians, and our relation to God 
as a purely personal matter, the case may be 
different; but if we recognize definite relation- 
ships either to an organization or to a living 
organism, we must, in the one case, help ful- 
fill the aim for which our organization was 
chartered; or, in the other, reproduce the life 
entrusted to us for that purpose. In either 
case, we must do it with all our might and 

125 



The Church's Life 

with settled determination, or face the risk of 
losing either our fellowship or our life. 

I have applied this reasoning to every fol- 
lower and member of Christ. But you will find 
many persons (possibly a mirror will show you 
one) who tacitly assume or actually state that 
our Lord's command was given only to His 
Apostles and therefore that, by implication, He 
intended to limit the Great Commission to a 
body of men set apart for the purpose. I re- 
member once hearing a deaconess whose life- 
work lay in a busy down-town parish, say that 
she had never worked in the mission-field — an 
astounding statement from one who passed 
every day of her life in just such a field. But 
she was only voicing the very common and 
pernicious idea that to be a "missionary" in- 
volves going away somewhere. Suggest to an 
average Church boy that he become a mis- 
sionary, and he immediately shows you that, 
in his opinion, you have proposed to him an 
extraordinary and abnormal career; and this 
because he has imbibed, from all that he has 
seen and heard, the strange misconception that 
ministers always have to be ordained men, and 
that our Lord entrusted His mission to them 
alone in the person of the Apostles. Presently 
the average boy becomes the average layman, 
still imbued with the deep-rooted idea that he 
has united with others in hiring an ordained 
man to act for him as parish priest, preacher 
and pastor — in other words, to do all the "re- 

126 



The Great Charter of the Church 

ligious work" in the community — and that oc- 
casionally God calls one of these men, or per- 
haps even a layman like himself, to become a 
"missionary," and to be regarded henceforth 
by him with a sort of wondering aloofness as 
an extremely peculiar person dedicated to the 
task of "converting the heathen." It never 
seems to occur to this average layman that he 
himself is a missionary by the very terms of 
his membership in the Church; that his mis- 
sion is to the bodies and minds and souls of 
every one in need right where he is ; and that, 
unless he has spent his life in solitary confine- 
ment, he has been brought up all his life in a 
mission-field, and in the very midst of the 
heathen. This is simply because he has never 
really read the Book of the Acts. 

If we turn to that record of the life of the 
early Church, we find that it was some time 
before the members of the Church began to 
realize that the Lord's command was intended 
for every one of them and that "all the world" 
meant something more than Jerusalem or even 
Judaea. Small blame to them perhaps; cer- 
tainly less than to us nowadays ! For they had 
been told to wait in Jerusalem until the Day 
of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Ghost 
with power ; then they had immediately found 
abundant opportunity to exercise their new- 
found powers right where they were. The 
Church in Jerusalem grew with astonishing 
rapidity, and was held in awed repute by the 

127 



The Church's Life 

city crowds; the Supreme Court and other 
rulers threatened, it is true, but the members 
of the Church had abundant evidence that the 
powers of God were on their side; money 
poured into their common treasury, enabling 
every Church-member to be comfortably pro- 
vided for; and everything was favorable in 
Jerusalem. 

But evidently the Church was too much "at 
ease in Zion" to suit the plans of God. If she 
declined to follow- the missionary Christ of her 
own free will, she must be driven to. To ac- 
complish this result God sacrificed one of His 
ablest servants — a man who apparently had a 
great Christian career before him and who 
could be ill spared from any work contemplat- 
ing missions to the Gentiles, even though he 
was not an Apostle. Stephen — a "Grecian" 
Jew, a deacon, and a man "full of grace and 
power" — fell a victim to the mob and was 
stoned to death. So God worked His will for 
the Church, for "there arose on that day a 
great persecution against the church which was 
in Jerusalem; and they were all scattered 
abroad . . . except the Apostles" And they 
"that were scattered abroad went about preach- 
ing the word" (Acts 8:1, 4). Who were these 
people who went about preaching? Only a 
single ordained man is mentioned by name; 
the vast majority of them must have been lay 
people, and the only members of the Church 
not thus forced to exercise their "missionary" 

128 



The Great Charter of the Church 

calling were those very Apostles to whom 
alone, according to our average layman, Christ 
had committed His mission and who were 
therefore properly to be called "missionaries/' 
This was undoubtedly a stern method by 
which to arouse the members of the infant 
Church to their duty, but apparently none 
other was adequate at the moment. At any 
rate it suffices to show us today that our Lord's 
command was intended to apply to every mem- 
ber of His Church, clerical and lay, ordained 
and not ordained ; and that every Christian is 
bound to take a personal and active part in 
fulfilling that command. Indeed, the same two- 
fold obligation rests upon every member of the 
Church today, as in those early times : "They 
continued steadfastly in the apostles' teaching 
and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and 
the prayers" (Acts 2:42); and they so con- 
tinued in order that they might "go into all 
the world and preach the gospel to the whole 
creation" (St. Mark 16:15). These two say- 
ings present a very fair definition of what it 
means to be a Christian. The first represents 
Christians as those who are something, that 
is, steadfast in accepting the doctrine which 
the Apostles taught and transforming it into 
daily practice; steadfast in maintaining, to- 
gether with the Apostles, their fellowship and 
unity in the Body; steadfast in recalling and 
confirming that unity by the constant receiv- 
ing of the Holy Communion; and steadfast in 

129 



The Church's Life 

joining in a form of common worship peculiar 
to the Christian Church. There was nothing 
else to distinguish those early Christians from 
their fellow- Jews. They lived like Jews, they 
held to Jewish customs and observances, they 
maintained their relations with synagogue and 
temple, there was no sharp break with Juda- 
ism; but in the mass of Judaism they formed 
a little nucleus, and, by noting their loyalty to 
one another, their meetings together for spe- 
cial forms of worship, and, above all, their con- 
sciousness of a new life thrilling and trans- 
forming them, it was easy to tell who were 
Christians. 

The second saying represents Christians as 
those who are doing something. Not only 
were they living a different life, with new 
motives, new courage, new understanding, 
new ideals; but they were going everywhere, 
"preaching the word" — not orally always, but 
by example, by evidences of power; and, fur- 
thermore, in expressed obedience to a command 
from God. They had witnessed a stupendous 
event ; they had shared in a resurrection ; they 
knew a power capable of turning the world 
upside down and transforming it into a King- 
dom where the righteousness of God should 
inspire and control every act of man ; and this 
good news each one of them felt bound to 
announce, this transformation each one felt 
bound to promote. "We cannot but speak the 
things which we have seen and heard" — this 

130 



The Great Charter of the Church 

was the real compulsion which persecution 
merely made effective. For this, no ordina- 
tion was essential. The layman, whatever 
business or occupation he might pursue, felt 
the demands of one great profession — that of 
the missionary, and he would have been beyond 
measure puzzled if he had found among "the 
prayers" such an one as that with which many 
modern Church people are familiar, containing 
the petition, "We commend to thy fatherly care 
all whom thou hast called to take part in the 
missionary work of thy Church. " For, in the 
only Christian community which he knew any- 
thing about, every one was a missionary, keen 
to tell what he himself had seen and heard 
and experienced; and the kind of prayer with 
which he was becoming most familiar was, 
"Now, Lord, grant unto thy servants to speak 
thy word with all boldness, while thou stretchi- 
est forth thy hand to heal" (Acts 4:29, 30). 

It was by these marks, then, that an observer 
in the first century could readily distinguish a 
Christian from other people : the Christian was 
seen to withdraw himself frequently into the 
fellowship of his beloved community, there to 
meet his Lord in prayer and in the blessed 
Sacrament; and hence he was seen to issue 
eagerly to apply to the needs of all men every- 
where the principles of the Life which he had 
received, the Truth which had been revealed 
to him, and the Way which led to the Father. 

If this was true of the first century, why not 
131 



The Church's Life 

of the twentieth ? Where shall we find a better 
or simpler definition of the much-defined noun 
"Christian" than this: one who continues 
"steadfastly in the apostles' teaching and fel- 
lowship, in the breaking of bread and the 
prayers"; and who "goes into all the world, 
preaching the gospel to the whole creation"? 
No matter what his avocation, this surely is 
the profession of every Christian, for "Bap- 
tism doth represent unto us our profession; 
which is, to follow the example of our Saviour 
Christ, and to be made like unto him" (Book 
of Common Prayer, p. 251). 

And what is true of the individual Christian, 
is equally and even more evidently true of the 
whole Church. For she is the bodily Presence 
of Christ on earth and therefore must, in the 
very nature of things, have aims and do works 
identical in every respect with His. She is a 
life-saver to bring life to dying souls. She is 
a militant body, to fight everywhere, in Christ's 
name and as He did, against disease and ig- 
norance and sin. 

Apply this, if you like, to your own parish! 
What reason for existence has your parish 
church with its body of believers? Of course 
the building is there for the use of all who 
desire to unite in the common worship of God; 
it is warmed and lighted and otherwise made as 
comfortable as is thought necessary; it is en- 
riched and beautified as is fitting for a place 
set apart as a temple consecrated to God's 

132 



The Great Charter of the Church 

presence and use ; everything is done to insure 
that His true and living Word may be effec- 
tively set forth and His holy Sacraments be 
rightly and duly administered, that so the body 
of believers may be nurtured in the Faith 
and their souls continually strengthened. But 
surely this is not all. Is it, indeed, more than 
a means to an end? A life-saving station has 
its comfortable quarters for its men where they 
can be drilled and exercised in order to keep 
fit; its well-appointed life-boat scrubbed and 
neat, brass-work polished, everything in place. 
But what for? No sensible person would 
dream of saying that the men were cared for 
in order that they might become types of phys- 
ical perfection, or that the boat was kept in 
perfect condition in order to be looked at. No, 
all this is in order that boat and crew may at 
every moment be ready for the service of peo- 
ple in desperate need. Everything must be 
made subservient to this ; nothing must be per- 
mitted which will in any degree detract from 
the most instant and perfect service. During 
the winter, in many of our life-saving stations 
along the coast, the crews are exhausted, the 
boats worn and battered. All honor to them ! 
These are the evidences that they have nobly 
served their purpose. There is, on the other 
hand, many a parish so neat and well-ordered 
and self-satisfied and forgetful of the reason 
for its existence, that it avoids any active serv- 
ice for fear lest, in aiding stricken humanity, 

133 



The Church's Life 

it might spring a leak itself or get its paint 
scratched. Better founder in service than rot 
in disuse! 

So the function of any militant body is to 
fight the common enemy. I recall the case of a 
family who for years had housed and cared for 
a self-centered relative, hipped on himself and 
generally useless, but still an object of solicit- 
ous care. The children had been taught that 
"Uncle George" must be deferred to, spared 
all unnecessary steps and saved in every way. 
Finally one of the youngsters of the family, 
on being told for the hundredth time to run an 
errand for Uncle George because his uncle 
"must be saved as much as possible," blurted 
out the natural question, "Mother, what in the 
world is Uncle George being saved forf" 

It might be well for the parish which re- 
joices in its financial safety and well-being, 
or the individual who believes himself to be 
"saved," occasionally to ask, "What am I saved 
for?" Happy the church, the parish or the 
individual so conscious of unity with Jesus 
Christ that the one aim and object of existence 
is felt to be the daily meeting with Him in His 
inner sanctuary in order to go out with Him 
to all the world even at the cost of being 
scarred and bruised and worn as He was, and 
bearing the honorable marks of His service. 
"He saved others, Himself he cannot save," 
must always be the mark of the Christian. 

134 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CALL TO INTELLIGENCE 

I spoke, in a previous chapter, of obedience 
to our Lord's last command as one of the in- 
centives to Christian activity. We can not 
with impunity evade or minimize the obliga- 
tion of those solemn words, "Go ye into all the 
world," even though our "going" may, by the 
circumstances in which God Himself has 
placed us, be restricted in area or confined to 
the activity of intelligent praying, intelligent 
giving, etc. 

We have seen how the Lord's Prayer — the 
prayer so perfectly characteristic of Him and 
therefore so truly "in His Name" — is a prayer 
the central and dominant note of which is 
missionary activity on the part of the mem- 
bers of God's family toward every human 
being as yet outside that family. I hope, too, 
that whether we regard the Church as a mere 
organization to be split up and re-formed at 
man's will, or whether we regard it as a liv- 
ing organism not to be torn in pieces except 
with agony and loss of power, we have also 
seen that the final command of Jesus Christ 
is in the nature of a charter which can not be' 

135 



The Church's Life 

ignored if the organization is to continue, and 
that obedience to it is an evidence of life which 
no member can surrender and yet remain as 
other than a useless or harmful portion of the 
Body. 

To the loyal soldier and servant, disobedi- 
ence is a cardinal sin; to the living member of 
a body amputation spells death. There can be 
no question but that God can not abide either 
an inactive Church or an inactive member of 
His Church. Perhaps the most striking exam- 
ple of this was the violence with which, as we 
have seen, He drove the early Christians away 
from Jerusalem. 

The objection will at once be raised that the 
disciples could not have felt very strongly — 
no more strongly in fact than most of us do — 
the mandatory quality of their Master's last 
command, if a catastrophe was needed to im- 
press it upon them. To this it may be replied 
that many circumstances combined to make 
them temporarily forgetful of it. There was 
evidence of the desperate need of the good 
news where they were ; they were meeting with 
phenomenal success ; the new spirit of brother- 
hood had produced in the Church a condition 
of ease and well-being hard to relinquish; 
parochialism had seized upon them. No won- 
der that they postponed literal obedience to 
the Lord's command and forgot the way in 
which He once turned His back on the bitter 
need of His fellow-townsmen of Capernaum 

136 



The Call to Intelligence 

in order to carry His message to the "next 
towns" as well ! One must remember also that 
it was not many, even of the original disciples, 
who had heard His imperious missionary com- 
mand. It had doubtless been repeated to others 
by those who had heard it, but it had not yet 
become part of a written gospel, the common 
property of all, read and known by every one. 
The moment, however, that they were forced 
out of Jerusalem, they showed the same eager 
spirit, as bearers of a good message, which 
they had shown within the walls of Jerusalem. 
What they had been doing intensively, they 
now did extensively. They had found the way 
of life — nay, they had found Life itself, and 
they couldn't keep it to themselves. No mere 
command to carry the good news was neces- 
sary; they felt what a modern writer has ex- 
pressed — "He who has what the world lacks 
is a debtor to the world." It was not obedience 
to an outward command so much as the inner 
compulsion of a joyous assurance which made 
these early Christians "go everywhere, preach- 
ing the word," when once they had been forced 
to look beyond the bounds of their own neigh- 
borhood. They unconsciously imitated the 
Christ without consciously obeying His com- 
mand; and the more they saw of the world's 
need, the farther they went bearing the answer 
to it. Obedience to the Lord's command, then, 
is not for us, any more than it was for them, 
a primary incentive to missionary interest and 

137 



The Church's Life 

activity. His commands, however, are neces- 
sary in order to stimulate some of us to such 
activity, and it may be well therefore to ex- 
amine what He said further by way of com- 
mand along this line. 

I wonder if any one ever became really in- 
terested in any great cause without knowing 
something about it? A certain author has, I 
believe, recently written a book or an article 
with the title, On the Moral Obligation of 
Being Intelligent. It is a striking phrase be- 
cause it is true. The more a project or a cause 
involves distinctly moral issues, the more a 
man is morally bound to learn all he can about 
it in order to give or withhold his support on 
intelligent grounds. It was surely so in the 
case of the recent war. If the American 
Government had been content merely to an- 
nounce casually that there was a war going 
on somewhere in Europe; that people at all 
interested could read something about it in the 
Congressional Record; that it had some ill- 
defined relation to this country; and that if 
any one cared to take an active part in it, there 
was a recruiting station somewhere — if such 
had been the course followed, the German 
Kaiser would today represent the only power 
in the world. Fortunately, things were not 
done that way. Our public men were deter- 
mined, from the outset, that, however we might 
individually regard war in itself, we should 
not be allowed to remain unintelligent re- 

138 



The Call to Intelligence 

garding this war. The press got busy; dis- 
tinguished authors wrote books; the cables 
brought news which was at once published; 
every single man of us, when he came down to 
breakfast, instantly seized the paper to scan 
the war-news ; to every nook and corner of the 
land went information as to what the war was 
about, which side had temporarily the upper 
hand, and what dangers threatened in case 
Germany should win out. The consequence 
was that interest in the war and in our share 
in it was aroused in every quarter ; and though, 
in the opinion of many, the United States 
might have gone in earlier, it is certain that 
when we did go in, we did so intelligently, 
knowing perfectly well why we were doing it. 
To have been unintelligent in the matter would 
have been immoral, since the issues at stake 
were moral issues. Having become intelligent, 
we bent our backs to the huge task, and we did 
it thoroughly. We sent our sons to undergo 
rigorous training preparatory to facing hor- 
rors and death; every pair of hands debarred 
from fighting was busy in one or more of in- 
numerable ways, all with a view to winning 
the war; we prayed and studied and read; we 
were elated by news of victories and depressed 
by news of defeats; all this and more we did 
because we were intelligently interested. 

Perhaps it is needless to draw a comparison 
between this attitude of mind toward the 
European War and the attitude of the average 

139 



The Church's Life 

Churchman toward the far greater war, in- 
volving vaster issues, in which the Church is 
engaged. Regarding this, the ordinary run 
of Church people are absolutely unintelligent. 
They read little about it and study less; they 
know nothing about where it is being waged 
or what are the strategic points; they are ig- 
norant of the great leaders, even their names ; 
they have only the vaguest idea of what it is 
about ; victory and defeat alike leave them cold. 
Of course, under these circumstances, the sug- 
gestion from one of their sons that he is con- 
sidering, as his career, the hard life of an 
active fighter, whether in the ranks or as an 
officer, is usually met with the barest tolerance, 
if not with all possible discouragement. 
"There's nothing in the ministry, my boy, for 
a man who really wants to get on." How 
familiar it sounds! And when it comes to 
giving to his central board of strategy the 
money necessary in order that the war may be 
prosecuted to a successful end, no wonder that, 
for years past, the average communicant of 
the Episcopal Church has been content with a 
gift of less than three cents a week ! He has 
no conception of the magnitude of the cause 
he is asked to give to, or of the tremendous 
issues involved. The trouble is that he is 
guilty of the sin of willing stupidity; he is im- 
moral because unintelligent toward the su- 
preme objective for which the Church is work- 
ing and righting. 

140 



The Call to Intelligence 

Long ago, our Lord put to His disciples a 
most searching question: "What do ye more 
than others ?" (St. Matt. 5:47). The varied 
activities mentioned above, in connection with 
the war, had no distinctively Christian charac- 
ter ; every one — Christians and non-Christians 
alike — joined in them. What distinctively 
Christian efforts toward victory were made by 
us; what did we Christians do more than 
others? If the war was really fought to bring 
in peace and righteousness on earth, is not this 
the very objective of the Church's warfare 
always ? What are we doing more than others, 
to attain this object? We rejoice that we are 
members of a Catholic and Apostolic Church; 
what do we more than others ? We occupy a 
certain position in the Church; what do we 
more than others? It is no general average of 
intelligence or interest or activity that is im- 
plied in our Lord's question, for He follows it 
at once with the statement, "Ye therefore shall 
be perfect." Whatever others may do or leave 
undone, "What is that to thee? Follow thou 
Me." 

Now our Lord's first command regarding 
missionary activity is in the line of acquired 
intelligence. He never approved of an unin- 
telligent ordained or unordained ministry ; still 
less of a ministry based on anything other than 
a knowledge of the world's need, so far as it 
could be seen. His first command, therefore, 
is "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields' 5 

141 



The Church's Life 

( St. John 4:35). The circumstances which gave 
rise to this command were rather interesting. 
He had just succeeded in piercing the hardened 
conscience of a despised Samaritan woman. 
His disciples, who had left Him outside of the 
town in order to get some food, were not a 
little scandalized, on rejoining Him, at finding 
what He had been about — actually conversing 
familiarly and at some length with a woman 
with whom they, for many reasons, would have 
had no dealings whatever. The woman had 
returned to town somewhat hastily, and now, 
there she was coming back again along the 
dusty road, and with her a train of white-clacf 
townspeople. Here are foreign missions ap- 
proaching, led by rumors of good news brought 
by a woman. "Lift up your eyes and look/' 
says our Lord. "See the need — the oppor- 
tunity." And the result? The need is made 
evident even to those Jewish men; prejudice 
and indifference vanish before it, and for two 
days they actually take up their quarters 
with the hateful Samaritans — working among 
them? Perhaps — but at least watching their 
Master as He shows them His saving power. 
More than this. When, months afterwards, 
Philip goes to that same city proclaiming what 
these Samaritans had before only dimly seen, 
the results are simply marvelous, and all be- 
cause other disciples had followed their Mas- 
ter's first missionary command in taking the 

142 



The Call to Intelligence 

trouble to lift up their eyes and look on one 
small fraction of the world's need. 

It was quite the same in Christ's own home- 
mission field. Throughout the neighborhood 
of Capernaum He sees the pitiable needs of 
the multitude, physical and spiritual (St. 
Matt. 9:36, 37). It stirs Him profoundly, and 
He just begs the disciples to note it, too — the 
desperate need — so little to meet it with. 

This, then, is the command which precedes 
all others, on which in fact depends the effec- 
tiveness of the others ; and it was this command 
which, of late, the American Church obeyed 
for the first time in all her history. General 
Convention, in 1919, gave its sanction to a 
Survey which had been previously undertaken. 
That survey was hardly more than a glance at 
the opportunities at home ; it covered overseas 
only those limited areas in which the American 
Church is in some measure attempting to ful- 
fill her mission; it naturally could not even 
mention the activities of other Christian com- 
munions much larger than her own. But it did 
afford a glimpse, and through it every Church- 
man had an opportunity to lift up his eyes and 
look on the fields in order to judge intelligently 
of the opportunity and to act accordingly. 

If he took this means of becoming intelligent, 
which the Church provided, it is difficult to see 
how he could have been other than driven to 
fulfill our Lord's second missionary command. 
The need is staggering; so much he must have 

143 



The Church's Life 

realized. No human being can look at it with- 
out feeling his impotence in face of it. "There- 
fore," says the Master, "pray ye the Lord of 
the harvest that He send forth labourers into 
his harvest" (St. Matt. 19:38). More and 
better Christians — that is what is needed ; more 
intelligent zeal; a deeper sense of the joy of 
giving money wisely and seeing it work; a 
more manifest giving of personal service to 
meet a definite need. 

It is odd how instinctively I apply the prayer 
for laborers to almost any one but myself. As 
one of our bishops wittily said, "The average 
Christian answers God's call to service much 
as Isaiah did, only with the change of one 
pronoun, 'And I heard the voice of the Lord, 
saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for 
us? Then I said, Here am I, send him! " It 
is quite time that we realized that when a man 
prays God to send forth laborers, one of those 
laborers must assuredly be the man himself. 
It is a prayer for increased activity in personal 
service, and it makes little difference where or 
how that service is given, whether in New 
York or Shanghai, so long as it is deliberately 
intended to meet a specific need, and is most 
liberally given where the need is seen to be 
greatest. 

It might be added that in these days the 
sending of laborers to fields where the need is 
greatest involves a considerable expenditure 
of money. Many a man keeps a laborer in his 

144 



The Call to Intelligence 

pocket-book ; all that is needed is to let him out. 
So our Lord adds to "looking" and "praying" 
a third missionary command, "Freely ye have 
received, freely give" (St. Matt. 10:8). He 
was referring, of course, to power — the power 
to heal, to exorcise, to give life; but, after all, 
is not money a form, of power? Of this the 
disciples had none, and naturally they couldn't 
give what they didn't have; but always they 
did as they had been told to do. "Such as I 
have give I thee." What they gave was much 
more valuable than "silver and gold" of which 
they had none ; but, equally with them, we have 
power and the means of setting power free to 
act. Offer this power to God and all of it will 
be used; keep it yourself and much of it will be 
abused. Again, the command to give is closely 
connected with the command to pray. It is a 
poor prayer which counts on God's activity and 
not at all on our own. What of good a man 
desires for himself or others, he can never be 
content merely to pray for ; he must also give 
whatever he has to give. To pray for the 
Church's mission and at the same time to give 
to it only a minute proportion of our money 
is a form of mocking God. Prayer, too, is an 
essential means of increasing our desire to 
give. Indeed, St. Paul considers liberality as 
a grace — as a gift from God — like love and 
faith and hope and other Christian graces. 
Those who find it hard to give freely (usually 
the rich) should read the eighth and ninth 

145 



The Church's Life 

chapters of the Second Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, and see how St. Paul, in urging liber- 
ality, refers to it not as an inherent quality 
or as one easily acquired, but as a direct gift 
from God, to be prayed for and earnestly culti- 
vated. Possibly the trouble with the average 
Christian is that while he has prayed for mercy 
and forgiveness and holiness, he has never 
asked God to give him willingness to part with 
his money freely, gladly, and intelligently. It 
is a grace which comes with praying and in- 
creases with use. Only after the disciples had 
obeyed the commands to "Look," to "Pray," 
and to "Give," were they fully prepared to re- 
ceive the final command to "Go." Evidently 
much preparation is required for intelligent 
activity in the Church's mission. We have 
already discussed sufficiently the meaning and 
the mandatory character of the Great Com- 
mission. Here, therefore, let me merely point 
out that in attempting to fulfill the command 
to get busy, without any definite knowledge of 
the needs which call for our activity and with- 
out any prayer for increased willingness to 
offer ourselves with whatever we may have 
besides, the chances are that we shall merely 
make a botch of it and get in the way of those 
who are really working intelligently. God has 
joined together zeal and discretion ; let no man 
put them asunder. 

So much for the incentive of our Lord's 
commands to us concerning the mission of His 

146 



The Call to Intelligence 

Church to all the world. That obedience is a 
primary motive in the mind of a soldier and 
servant, no one, I suppose, would deny. But 
it is difficult to believe that mere obedience to 
a "Thou shalt," is ever the highest motive for 
a soldier of Christ; it is doubtful if the early 
Christians would ever have given this as the 
incentive to their activity. No ! What drove 
them out was a remarkable experience which 
they had had — an experience which had made 
new men of them, and regarding which they 
simply couldn't keep still. 

A few pages back, I tried to picture the un- 
intelligent, unsympathetic attitude of the aver- 
age Churchman toward the Church's war, and 
I contrasted it with his well-informed, alert, 
indomitable activity in the European war. I 
think the picture was a fair one — the analogy 
measurably warrantable. There can be no 
question but that the prevailing attitude of 
mind, on the part of Christians, toward the 
cause of Christ and the coming of God's King- 
dom on earth ; and, above all, toward their own 
personal experience of the saving power of 
Christ, of the new life born in them, and of 
their glorious destiny as sons of God, is one 
of haziness and half-hearted acquiescence, and 
a sort of formal, matter-of-course acceptance. 
What it lacks is reality and dynamic. How 
vastly different was the attitude of every mem- 
ber of the early Church toward the Church's 
mission. They knew for themselves what 

147 



The Church's Life 

Jesus Christ — the Captain of their Salvation — 
had done for them ; they felt in themselves the 
surging pulsation of a new life; they saw only 
forces of destruction in a world ignorant of 
their Lord ; and every fibre in their being was 
stirred with the determination to bear Him 
and His message to a world for which they 
knew, out of their own experience, that there 
could be no other possible redemption. This, 
I take it, is the highest motive of missionary 
activity and its most powerful incentive. "We 
cannot but speak the things which we saw and 
heard," was the answer by which the Apostles 
justified themselves for continuing their work 
even in the face of legal restrictions. So, later, 
St. Paul refused any credit for preaching the 
Gospel, since his whole personal experience of 
it forbade silence regarding it (i Cor. 9:16). 
It must be the same today. It is inconceivable 
that any man who has really had the full per- 
sonal experience of Jesus Christ can keep it 
to himself. He has become a son of God — a 
member of Christ; through union with Christ 
he has entered the Kingdom of Heaven in 
which unending life and joy and peace have 
become his rightful possessions; he is min- 
istered to and fed by Christ Himself; all un- 
certainty and fear regarding the future are 
removed; in the peace of God he walks in the 
way of Christ. Even if this full experience 
has, as yet, been denied him, surely his mem- 
bership in the family of God must mean some- 

148 



The Call to Intelligence 

thing to him ; he must find in it some advantage 
which the man next him needs. Take a simple 
illustration. You have come across a medicine 
which claims to be a sure cure for every 
physical ailment. You try it for a headache 
and experience its virtue ; it has done you good. 
You meet a friend, suffering as you did, and 
the first thing you do is to tell him of the new 
medicine. The chances are that you put your- 
self to some trouble to search out people who 
are in similar need ; you may conceivably make 
rather a bore of yourself through your enthu- 
siasm. It is an unworthy illustration, but the 
case is the same with everything which benefits 
you. Instinctively you recommend it to others 
— you advertise it. And this you do, not neces- 
sarily by talking— indeed you often gain more 
by not continually talking. Merely your con- 
stant use of a certain cereal at breakfast, or a 
special kind of physical exercise, is your best 
advertisement of that particular thing among 
your friends. They see that you enjoy and are 
benefited by it, and they are easily led to try 
it for themselves. So with a man's Christian- 
ity. If it means anything to him personally, he 
instinctively shows it to his neighbors. He is 
not always "talking religion" — God forbid! — 
but he is, at least to some extent, an illustra- 
tion of what Christianity does. We have 
spoken before of a Christian as a "witness." 
It must be remembered that witnessing is not 
necessarily done in words, or the giving of 

149 



The Church's Life 

testimony by talk. Indeed, "Actions speak 
louder than words" — a saying peculiarly appli- 
cable to the Christian. One's life and example 
at home, in church, at school or in one's office 
is stronger evidence for or against what one 
professes to believe than any amount of talk. 
I remember being present on one occasion at 
the session of a certain Church School. When 
the time came to repeat the Creed, the children 
sprang to their feet and stood at "attention" — 
heels together, arms straight at their sides, 
chests out, heads up ; then with one voice they 
made that splendid statement of the faith. It 
was enormously impressive. One felt that the 
Creed was the one thing that mattered — the 
one statement of absolute truth, and that those 
children would have said it equally boldly if 
they had been lined up in front of a firing- 
squad, and told that if they dared to repeat it 
to the end they would instantly be shot. Every 
child was, at that moment, a potential mis- 
sionary, for I am quite sure that had an un- 
believer listened to the Creed as they said it, 
he would have been convinced that here was 
something worth inquiring into. 

There is, however, another side to this need 
of bearing witness to a personal experience. 
Unless the experience has been a personal one, 
it hasn't the smallest value as convincing testi- 
mony. You can talk till doomsday about the 
virtues of a certain medicine, but the inevitable 
question will be, "Have you tried it yourself 

150 



The Call to Intelligence 

and found it good?" It is not so much a matter 
of the quantity of one's experience as of its 
quality. A man may be able to say with assur- 
ance no more than the opening sentence of the 
Creed. Very well ; then let him try to make the 
one fact of the Fatherhood of God mean some- 
thing of worth to himself first, then let him 
make it in some way influence his visible 
actions, and then let him tell another man 
what the belief has meant to him. Or perhaps 
the benefits of church-going are, for you, 
summed up in the pleasure of hearing good 
music or a thoughtful sermon; even this is 
worth something to you, an invitation to a 
friend to go with you and share what pleases 
you might conceivably result in his getting 
more than you have. But for heaven's sake 
and your own soul's sake avoid recommending 
anything which you haven't tried, and beware 
of even giving the impression that you know 
anything of belief and spiritual life beyond 
what you have personally experienced. On 
the other hand, and equally for your soul's 
sake, never hesitate, when opportunity offers, 
to recommend what you have experienced. 

Obedience, Personal Experience — these are 
two compelling incentives to missionary activ- 
ity. A third is to be found in a realization of 
the world's need. It is difficult to see how any 
one can look abroad on the world today and be 
satisfied that all is as it should be because all 
is as God wishes it to be. The tragedy of war 

151 



The Church's Life 

is in its aftermath. If people could but realize 
what misery follows in the track of war, no 
justifying cause for it would be allowed as 
sufficient. Truly a "Pentecost of Calamity" 
swept the world for four years. Death robbed 
the nations of millions of their bread-winners, 
and of thousands of their leaders in all the 
high adventures of the human mind; the rav- 
aged fields were left unsown, and children cried 
for bread in vain ; famine and disease ran riot, 
and no means were at hand to check them ; the 
wheels of industry moved slowly, if at all, for 
lack of material; oppression arose in new and 
unprecedented forms; Christians had been 
killed by Christians and non-Christians alike 
until there were actually fewer men and women 
to carry on the Church's mission than there 
had been before the war broke out. It is true 
that the torture of the world aroused the spirit 
of Christian sympathy and generosity to a de- 
gree far in excess of anything that the world 
had ever before experienced; but, in so vast 
a mass of agony and despair, all that could be 
done in alleviation was but a drop in the ocean 
of human need. Yet, after all, the war merely 
concentrated, in time and space, conditions 
which had before escaped notice because so 
widely spread. I suppose that the poverty, 
and consequent suffering, of the common peo- 
ple in every non-Christian land is absolutely 
inconceivable in this rich land of ours where 
day-labor receives thirty times what it does in 

152 



The Call to Intelligence 

China. To bitter poverty must be added the 
pangs of constant hunger verging on starva- 
tion. When five millions of people in one 
country starve to death in a single year in 
India, the fact hardly attracts our notice. 
This, it is true, was the result of an exceptional 
famine-year in India; but it is a menace from 
which the people of Asia and Africa are never 
free. It has been stated that in those lands, 
two hundred million people go to bed every 
night hungry, and half that number absolutely 
shelterless. Such conditions breed disease, es- 
pecially when accentuated by ignorance and 
disregard of the simplest laws of sanitation 
and hygiene. Epidemics take their toll of mil- 
lions every year. Many portions of Asia are 
veritable plague-spots, and it is only by taking 
the utmost precautions that Europe and Amer- 
ica are kept, to a certain degree, immune. One 
recalls the experience of a certain traveler who, 
visiting the docks at San Francisco, noted sev- 
eral tramp steamers from the Orient moored 
to the dock by hempen hawsers on each of 
which was strung a tin disc. On inquiring the 
object of the latter, he was horrified to learn 
that they were placed there to prevent the rats, 
possible carriers of the germs of bubonic 
plague, from crawling to the shore and infect- 
ing the people of San Francisco. 

The death-rate in every pagan land is simply 
appalling ; not merely the death-rate from dis- 
ease, but that due to the passive neglect of 

153 



The Church's Life 

childhood, and the active perils to which it is 
subjected. "In most Oriental towns the death- 
rate is estimated at over 45 per 1,000. In 
Bombay, the infant death-rate was 593 per 
1,000." (Quoted by Murray, from Paget's 
"The Claim of Suffering/') Closely asso- 
ciated with this is the degradation of woman- 
hood which is everywhere a characteristic of 
paganism. 

The picture is a dark one. That I grant. 
But its colors are dark because we Christians 
do not will to have them changed. The colors 
which have produced the somber picture are 
ignorance, immorality, hopelessness, fear, su- 
perstition, the exploitation of the many by the 
few. And these colors are the very antithesis 
of those which Jesus Christ uses; hence the 
profound difference between this picture and 
the one presented by every land where His 
Gospel has been applied in any degree effec- 
tively. Not for one single day need that pic- 
ture of the Orient remain as dark as it is; 
only our own indifference keeps it so. Nor is 
there any other reason for the hunger, the 
misery, the want which still mar the beauty of 
our own land. The smallest effort on our part 
— even so slight a one as the merciful Lord 
illustrates by "a cup of cold water only" — will 
serve to that extent to change existing con- 
ditions. 

But it is not only physical need which cries 
aloud for alleviation the world over. We have 

154 



The Call to Intelligence 

been accustomed to think of our own land as 
one in which illiteracy was almost unknown; 
but the war served to shock us into the discon- 
certing realization that four and a half mil- 
lions of Americans over twenty years old are 
unable to read or write any language what- 
ever; ten per cent of the men drafted into 
the war were similarly handicapped. Startling 
as these facts are, the conditions in the world 
at large are still more so. The vast majority 
of the world's population is sunk in densest 
ignorance. No less than eighty per cent of 
all human beings can neither read nor write. 
This means stagnation; for it is a fact proved 
by experience that only in those lands where 
the written or printed page is intelligible to 
the majority of the people have enlightenment 
and progress been made possible. Inability to 
read on the part of the very people to whom 
the Church needs most to minister hampers 
her in the discharge of her mission ; for where 
her representatives reach hundreds with the 
spoken word, they might reach millions were 
these able to read the written word. Illiteracy 
in a democracy is an intolerable menace ; in the 
world at large it is an offense to the God of 
all wisdom and power. As literacy increases 
and education advances, it becomes more and 
more essential that the latter be used to reveal 
God; otherwise all that is acquired is merely 
knowledge; wisdom remains as far off as ever. 
This is the task of the Church at home and 

155 



The Church's Life 

overseas, for it expresses one great need of 
the human race, which the Church alone is able 
adequately to supply. Again we must be 
warned that world-wide ignorance exists and 
brings with it its train of misery, only because 
we Christians are not determined to have it 
otherwise. More than this: We must make 
up our minds that wherever secular education 
has advanced, there it is our business to see 
that Christian education makes similar prog- 
ress. If Christians are content to watch im- 
passively a pagan land in the process of devel- 
oping a system of education which ignores God, 
then they must be prepared to face the inev- 
itable menace. One illustration may suffice. 
There can be no question but that Japan, by 
sheer force of energy and by extraordinary 
adaptability, has come to occupy a position of 
dominance in the Far East. Her ideals are 
bound to impress themselves on her neighbors. 
Can she be safely trusted with so vast a respon- 
sibility? Certain facts and figures recently 
published indicate a negative answer. Thus, 
for example, a recent Japanese writer is 
authority for the following: "It is not any 
exaggeration to state that, as regards the labor 
condition of women, Japan maintains the worst 
record known to the civilized world." {The 
Japan Review, Vol. IV, p. 87, 1920.) Has this 
any connection with the fact that, while Japan 
has developed a remarkable system of educa- 
tion, it is a system having no place for God and 

156 



The Call to Intelligence 



t> 



His righteousness? I think that the connec- 
tion is a close one. If so, the following figures 
are significant. There are, in the Imperial 
University of Tokyo, about live thousand 
students — men who ten years hence will be 
guiding the destinies of the Empire and her 
neighbors. Of these 5000 young men, 8 en- 
rolled themselves as Shintoists, 50 as Bud- 
dhists, 60 as Christians, 1500 as atheists, 
and 3000 as agnostics. In so far as these facts 
and figures reflect the spirit of modern Japan, 
they indicate the desperate straits in which she 
finds herself. Happily, signs are not wanting 
to show that she is beginning to realize her 
need. She is groping for a religion which can 
keep her straight. There was never a time 
when the Church had a greater opportunity to 
meet an educational need than at the present 
moment, and with these eager, virile neighbors 
of ours. 

But in thinking of the need of pagan lands 
for education, and Christian education, let us 
not forget our own portentous lack of the lat- 
ter. The teaching of Christianity is rightly 
placed in the hands of the Church rather than 
in those of the State; that is not a debatable 
question. But it is a very serious question 
how the Church is meeting this responsibility. 
We have discussed this in a previous chapter 
and need only emphasize here that, while the 
proportion of Christians to the whole popula- 
tion of the United States is deplorably small, 

157 



The Church's Life 

the proportion of Christians who can give any 
intelligent reason why they are Christians is 
smaller still; while almost infinitesimal is the 
proportion of Episcopalians who are prepared 
to give any adequate, or even self-satisfying, 
answer to the question, "Why are you an 
Episcopalian rather than a Baptist or a Roman 
Catholic ?" And this, be it noted, not because 
there are no adequate answers or that the 
necessary information is not readily accessible. 
No ! The truth is that most Christians must be 
classed as religious illiterates, and the blame 
lies with those of us who are indifferent to 
the world's intellectual needs and who have 
not enabled the Church to fulfill her mission 
to the minds of men. 

Nor, again, are the needs of the world ex- 
pressed merely in physical or mental terms. 
Indeed, these are the least of all. What the 
world needs in order to be satisfied is Jesus 
Christ. Nothing less will serve. It is incon- 
ceivable that any Christian man can face with 
equanimity the fact that out of a world- 
population of nearly seventeen hundred mil- 
lion human souls, hardly more than one-third 
have even received the news of the blessings 
of God's complete revelation of Himself in 
Christ, or of their redemption by Him. After 
twenty centuries, during which God has been 
calling upon the Christian Church to fulfill 
her mission, more than one thousand million 
souls are still awaiting the life-bringing news. 

158 



The Call to Intelligence 



a 



I am not unaware that there are those, 
usually of the kind that delight to speak of 
themselves as "hard-headed business men" 
(too often "bone-heads/' indeed, regarding the 
Church's mission) who, while they profess to 
be Christians, and even Churchmen, are yet 
so callous to all that Jesus Christ has brought 
to them that they have even succeeded in per- 
suading themselves that a partial revelation is 
"quite good enough for the heathen." "The 
dim light brought to the world through 
Buddha or Confucius is," they say, "all that 
the Oriental needs. He is accustomed to it ; it 
has produced saints; why disturb him with 
longings for anything higher?" Oh, the ig- 
norant selfishness of such Christians! They 
have simply never had their eyes opened to 
the fact that Christianity is not one religion 
among many, but rather the climax of all re- 
ligion. We are on dangerous ground when we 
allow ourselves to think of Judaism, Moham- 
medanism, Confucianism, etc., as separate 
"religions" ; for we are thus led to regard one 
"religion" as inherently suitable for one nation, 
another for another; and thereby we not only 
fall into error, but we minimize one of the great 
incentives to the spread of Christianity. 

Revelation is always a progressive and de- 
veloping work of God. "The path of the 
righteous is as the shining light, that shineth 
more and more unto the perfect day" (Prov. 
4:18). Always there have been devout souls 

159 



The Church's Life 

who, earnestly seeking righteousness, have 
discovered God. "In every nation he that 
feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is 
acceptable to him" (Acts 10:35). 

But while God has thus been revealed dimly 
to men of rare capacity in all ages and lands, 
it is as true of pagan lands now as it was in 
the days of Isaiah, that "darkness covers the 
earth and gross darkness the peoples. " What- 
ever of high ideal and moral excellence has in 
the past attached to the great ethnic religions 
in their purest forms, their appeal has never 
been to other than the few; while, even to 
them, they have proved merely pointers of the 
way, with no divine power to enable man to 
reach the goal destined for him of God. For 
the perfect light is Christ. In Him is the com- 
plete revelation of God, embracing all that 
man in his present state can possibly conceive 
of God, and capable of answering every need 
of every man and of all human relationships 
the world over. "The gospel," writes Dr. 
Jowett, "covers the whole bleak field of human 
need. There is no single human necessity 
which cowers and shivers outside the priv- 
ileged pale." It is true that a more complete 
revelation still is possible. It may be that 
there is yet to be developed on earth a race of 
men with greater capacity to receive and to 
apprehend God; it is certainly true that a far 
more perfect revealing of God awaits us when 
at last we are relieved of the blinding burden 

160 



The Call to Intelligence 

of the flesh (i St. John 3:2; Rom. 8:18-23; 1 
Cor. 2:9, 10). But, for us here, and for all 
men now, Christ is the one true light which, 
coming into the world, lighteth every man. 
For Him wait the nations now sitting in dark- 
ness and the shadow of death. By their own 
confession, none else can satisfy them. Their 
partial light is failing, and now God relies upon 
His Church to rekindle whatever of brightness 
there was in that light, and to use it as a 
means of revealing to all, "the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ." We dare not wait; for though 
God may have provided some way of approach 
to Him other than through Christ the Way; 
some other source of life other than incor- 
poration in His living Church through Bap- 
tism; some other means of union with Him, 
other than through the gift of the Spirit in 
Confirmation and the constant power of the 
Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — 
though God may, by His infinite grace, have 
provided a means of salvation for those who 
seek righteousness by the light they have; yet 
of all this we have no absolute assurance ex- 
cept as we trust in the uncovenanted mercies 
of God. Nor need these matters greatly con- 
cern us. Not the perils of ignorance and un- 
belief, but rather the unmeasurable blessings 
of faith — these form the message of God to 
man. The need of the world is desperate; we 
have the means of relieving it, in its every as- 

161 



The Church's Life 

pect. No partial revelation has proved able 
to stand the stress of complex modern life; the 
complete revelation is ours to give if we will. 
For us, and therefore for all, there is but One 
who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We 
are assured that nothing less than His Presence 
can satisfy the insistent needs of men, because 
that alone has satisfied ours. To see the need 
is to be stirred to activity, unless indeed we be 
"dead to the world." With pitying eyes, Jesus 
Christ looked upon the multitudes about Him. 
He saw them as sheep distressed and scattered, 
having no shepherd (St. Matt. 9:36). But 
mark ! What He felt was not mere pity. "He 
was moved with compassion for them." There 
is a vast difference between pity and compas- 
sion. The former is a natural human emotion 
which we delight to gratify. We go to the 
theatre and see a play depicting the pathos of 
a young girl betrayed. Tears spring to our 
eyes for very pity, but that is all; we rarely 
leave the theatre determined to see the reality, 
to meet the need and to remove the causes. So 
with the Greeks of old. The people of Athens 
thronged to the great tragedies of ^Eschylus 
and Sophocles; they gave free rein to their 
excited emotions, they were moved to tears; 
but history fails to tell us of any case where 
their emotionalism stirred any profound deter- 
mination to remove the causes of such deeds 
as had just excited their pity. Pity is a more 
or less pleasurable emotion; only when the 

162 



The Call to Intelligence 

emotion is translated into terms of remedial 
action can it be termed mercy or compassion. 
Nowhere, in the New Testament, are we told 
that God feels pity for us; it is God's mercy 
that we are taught to pray for, and by which 
we benefit practically. 

When, therefore, we become intelligently 
alive to the appalling needs of our neighbor- 
hood, of our fellow-citizens far or near, of the 
world groping for God in the shadows, we dare 
not be content with pitying. In such a case 
mere pity is worse than useless ; by every means 
in our power we must, in mercy, try to relieve 
the need. I wonder if it is necessary to repeat 
that, in these days, no man has any excuse to 
remain in ignorance of the needs of the world 
as they are related to the Church. They are 
everywhere apparent to any man who will 
think or read. "Lift up your eyes and look!" 
"When He saw the multitudes, He was moved 
with compassion for them." Here, then, are 
three mighty incentives to activity on the part 
of every loyal Christian : The Lord commands 
us; experience constrains us; Human need 
compels us. These motives should be sufficient, 
yet there are other incentives which should stir 
the modern man. For example, there is the 
fact that the world is contracting with startling 
rapidity; God is compressing all the nations of 
the earth into a neighborhood. In our contacts 
with nations once far distant, time and space 
are being almost eliminated. China is today 

163 



The Church's Life 

nearer to New York, even in terms of travel, 
than was New Orleans a hundred years ago; 
communication with China is a matter of 
minutes only. Every modern invention seems 
aimed at making the world smaller, and con- 
tacts between nation and nation more inevi- 
table. The very words "far" and "near" are 
ceasing to have much practical significance for 
us. The Orient is perilously close when, as we 
have seen, the proximity of its diseases can 
be measured in terms of a tin disc eight inches 
in diameter and a thirty-second of an inch thick 
strung on a ship's hawser to prevent the swarm- 
ing of infected rats. 

With equal ease our commodities, good and 
bad together, pass to the Orient; with equal 
difficulty — nay, with more, because ignorant 
of the menace — can the Orient protect itself 
against our evils. It is idle to say, as so many 
do, that the natives of other lands should be 
left to their own customs and "religions." 
Commerce will not have it so; trade demands 
an entry. And where commerce goes, bearing 
evil things as well as good, there the Church 
is bound to follow if only to counteract the one 
and to reenforce the other. It is not the 
Church in her mission overseas which is dis- 
turbing the placid calm of the Orient and 
arousing a spirit of unrest; commerce, with 
her myriad hands, is touching and awakening 
oriental life to countless new desires, and 
among these is the demand for western learn- 

164 



The Call to Intelligence 

ing which, to the observing Oriental, has given 
to the occidental nations their dominion in 
world affairs. The Church can not, with 
safety to herself or in justice to the Orient, 
fail to take advantage of the doors which com- 
merce is flinging wide open. The rapid spread 
of knowledge in this narrowing world is an- 
other powerful incentive to missionary activ- 
ity. We know more of central Africa today 
than our forebears in New England knew of 
Colorado. We read at our breakfast-table 
events which occurred in the Balkans or in 
New Zealand a few hours previously. Infor- 
mation regarding world needs from the Chris- 
tian standpoint is the easiest possible thing to 
acquire in these days. 

This knowledge is disarming racial preju- 
dices and destroying illusions. It is utterly 
impossible today to regard the Chinese or the 
Japanese as inferior races. If our illusions 
with respect to them are disappearing, so are 
theirs with respect to us. On both sides is a 
growing recognition of common virtues as 
well as of common defects. One of the tragic 
results of mutual intercourse between East and 
West has been the utter disillusionment which 
has come over young students from China and 
Japan when they have seen the conditions 
actually permitted to exist in this so-called 
Christian land and have experienced the care- 
less discourtesy with which Christian people 
have met them. We, for our part, have been 

165 



The Church's Life 

led by our growing knowledge of oriental peo- 
ples to the conviction that in certain spiritual 
qualities they far surpass us. Indeed it seems 
certain that Christianity, given first to an 
oriental people, later transmitted to Europe 
and interpreted in forms of occidental thought, 
now needs to be given back again to the Orient 
for reinterpretation by enlightened oriental 
thought. However that may be, the increas- 
ingly close physical contact between East and 
West is something to be carefully noted in con- 
sidering the incentives to missionary activity 
overseas. No one, for example, can measure 
the effect upon the heathen mind of having 
seen the great Christian nations of the world 
engaged in bitter war. The employment of 
thousands of Chinese laborers in France dur- 
ing the war can not fail to have produced, even 
on their dull minds, entirely new and extraor- 
dinary impressions — impressions which they 
will have carried back with them, for better or 
worse, on their return. They said little — these 
ignorant coolies — but doubtless they did a lot 
of thinking which may yet — who knows? — 
have a vast influence in China's future. 

Very dreadful will be the day when that 
nation of four hundred millions of people — a 
Republic embracing one-quarter of the world's 
population — fully arouses herself under the 
goad of international contacts, if she be al- 
lowed to note in those relationships, as they 
affect her, only the threat of diminishing boun- 

166 



The Call to Intelligence 

claries, and resources exploited for the benefit 
of foreigners! Very glorious for the world 
will be that day if the Church is able then to 
show America to China, not merely as a shrewd 
purveyor of material goods, but as a Christian 
people lifting up on high the Christ, that so, 
according to His most sure promise, all men 
may be drawn to Him, for the building up of 
His Body. 

"To seek missing members for the perfect- 
ing of Christ's Body" — is not this the aim of 
the Church's mission; can we not find in this 
objective our sufficient incentive? 



167 



CHAPTER VII 

THE POWER IN THE CHURCH 

We considered in previous chapters the in- 
centives which should stir Christians to mis- 
sionary activity. Obedience to our Lord's 
commands — obedience based on an intelligent 
view of the whole field and every aspect of it — 
this is a somewhat stern incentive, but in a 
measure fundamental. 

Careful thought upon, and deep appreciation 
of, the innumerable benefits which we our- 
selves have received as members of God's 
Family through Christ — this should be a 
supreme and compelling incentive. "We can- 
not but speak the things which we saw and 
heard" must ever be in the mind of the Chris- 
tian. The Methodists used to speak freely of 
experiencing religion. This is, perhaps, what 
we Churchmen need. 

Then there is the incentive which always 
comes from an intelligent outlook upon con- 
ditions in the world — the realization of peo- 
ple's desperate need of Jesus Christ to make 
them children of God, to give them abundant 
life, to move them to righteousness, to turn 
their chaos into order, to establish among 
them His joyous rule. There is no conceivable 

168 



The Power in the Church 

reason for the world's remaining in its present 
state a single year longer, except the cruel and 
faithless indifference of us Christians. Pity 
for those deprived of our blessings, mercy in 
enabling them to share, this is what is needed. 
These are the people for whom our Lord longed 
— other sheep, not yet of His fold, but neces- 
sary to complete His flock. Yes, necessary for 
the completing of His Church. Let us again 
define to ourselves the Church's mission: "To 
seek missing members of Christ's Body." 

We have considered, too, certain lesser in- 
centives — the decreasing size of the world 
when measured in terms of communication; 
the closeness of international relationships; the 
often menacing proximity of less advanced 
peoples; mutual disillusionment, and mutual 
understandings as well, due to our close con- 
tacts ; the opening of new opportunities through 
trade; the protection of the less powerful 
against the strong — all these considerations 
must inevitably stir us to activity if only as a 
means of self -protection. 

But in order to be active something more 
than incentive is necessary. A paralytic may 
have every incentive in the world to get up and 
walk, and yet be hopelessly inactive. What he 
needs is power. This is the tragedy of every 
partial revelation of God — of all religions short 
of Christianity. They may provide every in- 
centive to righteousness but they leave their 
votaries powerless to attain it. 

169 



The Church's Life 

Now this is precisely what the early Church 
had and what the modern Church appears to 
lack. The power behind the missionary activ- 
ity of the Apostles was so enormous that what 
they did by means of it seems miraculous. It 
was not miraculous in the least. Given the 
same source of power, we could accomplish 
precisely the same results. It is a rather start- 
ling thought and worth investigating. What, 
then, was the power behind the early Church 
when she began her mission? 

So long as our Lord was physically present 
with His disciples, His word, His example, 
He Himself, was the power. He appoints the 
Twelve and later the Seventy; He sends them 
off to do things, and somehow He and they 
become identified, and they find themselves 
working with a degree of power surprising 
even to themselves (St. Matt. 10; St. Luke 
10:1, 16-20). I suppose that it is quite im- 
possible for us to put ourselves in their place 
and realize what they must have felt. They 
had never dreamed of anything like it in their 
lives. They had seen Him — their Master — 
heal sick people; but it is doubtful if, as yet, 
they had seen any signs of His greater power; 
and, anyhow, He was the Lord and Master, 
they merely the humble friends and admirers ; 
what reason had they to suppose that they, 
poor stupid disciples, could ever be able to 
exercise the smallest fraction of His power! 
But they started off at His command, and they 

170 



The Power in the Church 

tried what He told them to try; and, to their 
astounded joy, they found that His power had 
actually become theirs, and that they could 
duplicate what, with curious awe, they had 
seen Him do. Peculiarly vicious or stubborn 
cases did baffle them at times. We recall one 
such case especially (St. Mark 9:14-20). They 
had been left alone for a time, even Peter and 
James and John had gone up into the hills with 
their Master, and a very gruesome case of deaf 
and dumb epilepsy had been brought to them. 
Moreover, the disease was of long standing, 
and, at the moment, was in terrifying activity. 
The very sight of the boy in convulsions, wal- 
lowing in the dirt and foaming at the mouth, 
unnerved them. They felt that here was a 
horror which no power could reach, certainly 
not theirs. Then the Master came, and, after 
deliberately inquiring into the matter, calmly 
gave the needed relief, and went home followed 
by the crestfallen disciples. "Why could not 
we cast it out?" they ask; and He assures them 
that the failure is entirely in themselves. More 
earnest prayer, more undoubting faith — that 
was all they lacked. One can imagine them, 
after that, clinging to Him more eagerly than 
ever, unwilling to be separated for a moment 
from the source of their power. How abso- 
lutely inconceivable to them, then, must have 
been the strange statement with which He an- 
nounced His approaching departure (St. John 
16:7). He was preparing to leave them ; never 

171 



The Church's Life 

again would they look into His face, or hear 
His words, or feel His hands in blessing, or 
see His power working through them — all this 
was intolerable even to think of. Expedient — 
better — for them? Preposterous! Yet He 
had just said it. Why? What comfort could 
be theirs if He were to leave them ; what power 
could they possibly find except in His presence ? 
Well, He tells them. "If I go not away, the 
Comforter — the Helper — will not come unto 
you; but if I go, I will send him unto you" (St. 
John 16:7). It is doubtful if they had any idea 
what He meant, or if they recalled another of 
His sayings, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
He that believeth on me, the works that I do 
shall he do also; and greater works shall he 
do; because I go unto the Father" (St. John 
14:12). But to us His meaning is plain. 
Abundant compensation for the withdrawal of 
our Lord's physical presence from His disci- 
ples was to be found in the coming of the Holy 
Ghost, the Comforter and Strengthener. He 
was to be their new source of strength ; it was 
through His power that they were to do even 
greater things than their Master had done. 
Our Lord could not, in His physical body, be 
with His disciples always in all places ; but He 
would send to them a spiritual Presence, no 
less real and personal than He had been, but 
able to be with them for ever (St. John 14:16). 
It was indeed expedient for them that the Holy 
Spirit should come to carry on and bring to its 

172 " 



The Power in the Church 

final goal the work which Christ had begun 
in His disciples during His earthly life. It 
would be well worth our while to read again 
carefully the fourteenth and sixteenth chap- 
ters of St. John's Gospel in order to realize 
just what our Lord guarantees that the blessed 
Spirit shall do in and through those who re- 
ceive Him and allow Him to dwell in them. 
The urgent need of His presence will thus 
become evident, for He alone can bring home 
to the world a sense of its sinfulness apart 
from Christ, of its redemption through Christ, 
and of the defeat of evil by Christ (St. John 
16 :8-io) . It is only through His teaching that 
we learn the truth about Christ and become 
able to interpret His teaching aright ( St. John 
16:13). 

But just here a word of caution is necessary. 
We must remember that truth is too big for 
any one man to grasp wholly. There is no 
promise that the Holy Spirit will reveal all 
truth to men singly. It was to the whole body 
of the disciples united that our Lord gave the 
promise, "Ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free' 5 (St. John 8:32). 
The whole round of truth is for the whole body 
of the Church. Paul had received a measure 
of truth, so had Apollos, so had Cephas; but 
if their respective followers imagined that to 
each had been revealed the whole truth, or if 
others fancied that they alone had the truth 
as Christ embodied it, the result could be only 

173 



The Church's Life 

endless contentions and divisions (i Cor. 
ir'ii, 12). It is in the whole united body of 
baptized believers that the Spirit of Truth 
dwells; in His communion and fellowship the 
truth is made known. 

It is in the person of the blessed Spirit that 
God abides in us with power. He it is who 
teaches us and bears witness to Christ in us 
and through us (St. John 15:26). He is the 
Spirit of Life — "the Giver of Life" as we 
assert in the Creed — by Whom we are made 
free from the law of sin and of death (Rom. 
8:2) — free to serve God. On His assurance 
alone we hold fast to the fact that God can 
make men His children — adopting them into 
His Family (Rom. 8:15, 16). Above all, He 
comes to give us power in God's service. "Ye 
shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is 
come upon you," said our Lord, "and ye shall 
be my witnesses . . . unto the uttermost part 
of the earth" (Acts 1:8). As has been said 
before, the remainder of the book is no more 
than a record of how that power was applied. 

No sooner had the Holy Ghost given sign of 
His presence with the Church on the Day of 
Pentecost than the Apostles began to show evi- 
dence of a vital transformation. Less than 
two months ago, in that same city of Jerusalem, 
they had seen their Master done to death with- 
out venturing a word of protest; two only had 
dared to be present at His trial, and one of 
these had denied Him openly through sheer 

174 



The Power in the Church 

cowardice; even after His Resurrection, they 
were found trembling in an upper room for 
fear of the Jews. But look at them now ! It 
is Peter himself — the faint-hearted denier of 
his Lord — who takes the lead in publicly de- 
nouncing the members of the dreaded San- 
hedrin as "men without the law," in that they 
had crucified a man approved of God. A few 
days later Peter and John face the same mob 
which had before demanded the death of the 
Righteous One, and plead the power of His 
Name; and the next day, standing trial before 
the very judges who had condemned the Christ, 
it is Peter who tells them with biting scorn 
that it was their Messiah whom they had cruci- 
fied; adding that in Him alone are salvation 
and power. What has happened to Peter? 
Simply this, that the Holy Ghost has come 
upon him, and has transformed Simon the 
trembler into Peter the rock. 

But in the great sweep of the Church's 
progress, one dominant figure stands out — 
the greatest miracle of all. Note him — Saul, 
the cultivated gentleman of Tarsus, aristo- 
cratic, learned, intolerant, bigoted, implacable 
— as his cold eyes watch the brutal murder of 
Stephen, the Christian witness. See him as 
he pursues his relentless way to Damascus to 
crush out the hated sect. Then listen to Paul, 
the slave of Jesus Christ, counting all his past 
as worthless if he can only gain Christ; fast- 
ening eager eyes on the prize of the high 

175 



The Church's Life 

calling of God in Christ Jesus ; glorying in his 
very infirmities that the grace of God may be 
more evident in him; suffering all things for 
the Gospel's sake, and, in utter humility, seeing 
himself at last as the chief of sinners in the 
growing light of the vision of God (Phil. 3: 
7-1 1 ; 13, 14; 11 Cor. 12:9, I0 ; x Tim. 1 115). 

Again, recall how blind to their Lord's real 
nature and mission these first Apostles had 
been a few weeks previously; how ambitious 
and self-assertive; how regardless and forget- 
ful of His teaching; how slow to understand 
and to believe His promises. Now, on the 
other hand, they see with perfect clearness that 
Jesus of Nazareth was the very Christ of God; 
that death could never, in the very nature of 
things, have had dominion over Him ; that He 
is the ever-living Saviour of the world. 

And then these astonishing men proceed to 
form a brotherhood among themselves on lines 
unknown to the world before — a brotherhood 
in which each offers what he can for the good 
of all, and in whose membership there are none 
who strive which should be the greatest (Acts 
4:32-35). Whence came the sudden enlight- 
enment, this new spirit of love? Surely from 
none other than the Holy Ghost, bringing to 
their remembrance all that their Master had 
said to them and taught them. 

Note, too, how simply these men who, not 
so many months before, had been puzzled to 
know how really to pray, now turn to God in 

176 



The Power in the Church 

their specific need and draw down power from 
on high (Acts 4:24-31). Boldness, enlight- 
enment, the power of prayer — these were the 
gifts of Him who had now come to take the 
Christ's place on earth, to abide forever with 
the Church, and to enable her to fulfill her 
mission. 

It will be noted that this power was mani- 
fested in extraordinary ways; the birthday of 
the Church was celebrated strikingly. By the 
grace of the blessed Spirit— though just how, 
we can not be sure — people of various tongues 
were enabled to receive the initial message ; the 
Apostles were able to deliver their message 
with results never attained even by our Lord 
Himself; thousands responded to the message; 
the sick were cured; the lame were made to 
walk ; even the dead were raised. Threatened, 
the Church prays ; and again the Spirit is 
poured out upon her in power and a sense of 
unity and brotherhood. Falseness within the 
blessed community is recognized as a sin 
against the Spirit and is punished accordingly 
(Acts 5: 3 and 9). He is the joint-witness, 
with the Apostles, to the saving power of 
Christ, the Messiah (Acts 5:32). He it is 
who fills St. Stephen with wisdom and power 
so that none can withstand him. "Ye stiff- 
necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," 
he thunders, when all his pleading eloquence 
has proved unavailing, "ye do always resist 
the Holy Ghost" ; and then He whom they had 

177 



The Church's Life 

resisted gives to His servant the supreme re- 
ward of steadfastness — the vision of his Lord 
in glory (Acts 7:55). 

Now take the Book of Acts and follow the 
rushing course of the Spirit.* 

The disciples are driven out of Jerusalem 
and the Church is scattered; but the presence 
of God the Holy Ghost remains with her. 
Philip, the deacon, goes down to Samaria — the 
Lord's own foreign mission field — and there 
he preaches and baptizes and heals. Word 
goes back to the Apostles that the Samaritans 
are now baptized and prepared to receive the 
Holy Ghost; and the leaders hasten down to 
fulfill their office, laying their hands upon them 
in Confirmation. So in every phase of Church 
extension, the Spirit demands His share. 
Philip is further made His instrument for 
planting the Church in Africa. He drives 
Peter, the ultra-conservative Jew, to see the 
needs of Gentiles and to respond to them. (No 
"foreign mission" of modern times demands a 
more utter laying aside of prejudice than did 
this.) He orders the Church of Antioch to 
select Saul and to send him, accompanied by 
Barnabas, on a great adventure all planned by 
Him beforehand. 

No less interested is He in the practice of 
the Church than in its extension. The mes- 
sage from the council of the Church in Jeru- 

*Acts Villi 5-8, 14-17, 27-39; X; XIII: 1-3; XV: 2&; 
XVI: 6-10; XIX: 5, 6; XX: 22, 23; XXI: 11. 

178 



The Power in the Church 

salem regarding the great rite of circumcision 
in its application to converts bears the impri- 
matur of the Holy Ghost; the matter has been 
decided by Him in council with the Church. 

From Antioch, St. Paul, this time with Silas 
as his companion, starts on his second journey 
intending to cover central Asia Minor. No 
thought of Europe has apparently entered his 
mind. He plans to go as far north as the 
Euxine Sea, passing through the Roman prov- 
ince of Asia ; but the Holy Ghost forbids him 
to preach there. Bithynia — the most northerly 
province — perhaps that is the goal ! No ! The 
Spirit forbids that. Where then? What is 
the meaning of this constant upsetting of 
plans? Hastening westward, the Apostle fin- 
ally comes to the narrow sea separating Asia 
from Europe. There at Troas — close to mem- 
orable Troy — the objective of the Holy Ghost 
is at last made plain in the vision of the man 
of Macedonia, the cry of Europe — "Come over 
and help us." Here, too, it seems that the 
Holy Ghost had provided for St. Paul the 
much-needed friend and physician in the per- 
son of St. Luke. 

On his third journey, St. Paul comes to 
Ephesus, and here, upon a few uninstructed 
disciples, the Holy Ghost comes with power 
through the laying on of Apostolic hands, and 
the new-born Church of Ephesus is estab- 
lished. On his journey home, it is the Holy 
Ghost who warns him of what he yet has to 

179 



The Church's Life 

suffer in order that the Church may reach 
farther and farther still. And, finally, it is the 
plan of the Holy Ghost that His servant shall 
be delivered over to his enemies in Jerusalem, 
that so at last the Gospel shall reach Rome — 
the center of the civilized world. 

Such was the irresistible course of the 
Church under the mighty driving power of the 
Holy Ghost. Very fittingly are the recorded 
sayings of the Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity during His ministry on earth imme- 
diately followed by the recorded doings of the 
Third Person of the Trinity who now abides 
with and in His Church — the Body of Christ. 

Now let us go back for a moment and see 
how and where the impetus to missionary activ- 
ity started. Turning to St. Luke 24:47, we 
find that it was our Lord's will that the Church 
should begin to fulfill her mission in Jerusalem, 
and that the disciples, instead of returning to 
their homes to begin work, should stay where 
they were and await further events. There 
were doubtless many reasons why the work 
was to begin in Jerusalem. It was always 
God's will that His message should be delivered 
to the Jews first of all. Jerusalem was the 
center of Judaism, and the present opportunity 
was quite unique. During His annual — pos- 
sibly more frequent — visits there, the Prophet 
of Nazareth had become a familiar figure in 
the city; His teaching and His claims had been 
such as to arouse popular interest ; during the 

180 



The Power in the Church 

week preceding the last Passover of His life, 
He was probably the most-talked-of man in 
town. When the Apostles later addressed 
great crowds and spoke of "J esus of Naz- 
areth," every one in the crowd knew whom 
they were talking about, and was familiar with 
the tragedy of the past few days. Being Jews, 
they were also able to understand the interpre- 
tation of those events as set forth by such men 
as St. Peter and, later, St. Stephen. Moreover, 
the Passover and the Feast of Pentecost had 
brought to Jerusalem a great concourse of 
Jews from many regions. It was an extraor- 
dinarily cosmopolitan crowd that faced St. 
Peter when he made his first announcement 
on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2 :o,-i 1 ). Rep- 
resentatives of no less than fifteen countries 
distributed over three continents received -the 
first message of the Christian Church. The 
opportunity was unprecedented, for most of 
those visitors to Jerusalem were returning 
home presently and could not fail to talk of 
those things which had so deeply impressed 
them. 

Again it was in Jerusalem, or its immediate 
neighborhood, that the events upon which St. 
Peter based his message had recently occurred, 
and, as has been said, every one present was 
familiar with them. 

Then, too, it was the severest possible test 
of their new-found courage, for the Apostles 
to be required to testify to Christ before the 

181 



The Church's Life 

very people who had rejected Him a couple of 
months before, and had condemned Him to the 
shame and horror of crucifixion as a common 
malefactor. It would have been far easier for 
them to have returned quietly to Galilee, and 
there, among those who still cherished the 
memory of His gracious Presence, spread the 
good news of life in His name ; but God would 
not have it so. 

Was there no further reason for beginning 
at Jerusalem? I remember putting this ques- 
tion once to a group of students, who there- 
upon proceeded to search for some abstruse 
reason. Having at last dug up and announced 
those given above, profound silence ensued 
until one youngster remarked quietly, "Wasn't 
it, perhaps, because it was where they hap- 
pened to be at the time?" Of course; but, as 
so often is the case in Bible study, it was the 
obvious which had escaped notice. 

This reason always holds good. It is seldom 
advisable, and more rarely is it necessary, for 
a man to look far afield for his opportunity to 
bear witness to Christ and the new life by 
example and word. God put him where he is, 
and the chances are that just where he is is the 
place where God means him to begin his activ- 
ities. This applies to the man not only when 
he is at home, but wherever he happens to be 
at the moment. As a matter of fact, not one 
of the Apostles lived at Jerusalem; they were 
there only temporarily. So with Saul and 

182 



The Power in the Church 

Barnabas. One of them lived at Tarsus, the 
other on the island of Cyprus; but they were 
both at Antioch when they began their joint 
work. In Saul's case, he had gone to Damas- 
cus at first with no intention whatever of 
preaching Christ — far from it. But when he 
got there, "straightway in the synagogues he 
proclaimed Jesus, that he is the Son of God." 

Now turn back once more to our Lord's 
command as recorded by St. Luke. The King 
James version gives the wording, "beginning 
at Jerusalem" ; but it is worthy of note that the 
Revised Version alters it to, "beginning from 
Jerusalem." The change of a preposition 
seems a slight matter ; but the propulsive force 
of the command is thereby immensely in- 
creased. The Church had no excuse for re- 
maining indefinitely in Jerusalem, whatever 
the need or however great the success. She 
had her source at Jerusalem, but she could no 
more be wholesomely and usefully confined 
there than can a stream be dammed up at its 
source without becoming a stagnant and force- 
less pool. So the Church, impelled and guided 
by the Holy Ghost, and bursting all barriers, 
flowed forth on her world-wide mission. 

The result is astounding. At the period 
when the Book of Acts opens, the Roman Em- 
pire embraced an area of two million square 
miles (two- thirds the size of the United 
States) ; it contained upwards of four thou- 
sand cities; it included a population of one 

183 



The Church's Life 

hundred million, of all peoples and tongues. 
The Church was composed of about five hun- 
dred persons (C/. i Cor. 15:5-6), most of them 
ignorant and poor ; their means of travel were 
limited; their message had to be delivered al- 
most entirely by word of mouth; the revela- 
tion of God which they had received and which 
they endeavored to pass on to others had been 
given in terms which were offensive to the 
religious Jew, a scorn and derision to the cul- 
tured Greek, and intolerable to the governing 
Roman. Yet in two centuries and a half 
Christ, through His Church, had conquered 
the Roman Empire. The conversion of Con- 
stantine in A. D. 312 made Christianity the 
accepted religion of the civilized world. Of 
all miracles, this is the greatest. How was it 
accomplished? Simply enough. Every Chris- 
tian was a missionary; the whole Church was 
full of the Holy Ghost and of power. The 
blessed Spirit eagerly desired that the message 
from the Father through the Son should be 
proclaimed in every corner of the earth and to 
every child of man. The holy, blessed and 
glorious Trinity is interested in missions. 

What stupor has come over the Church to- 
day? Since that great Pentecost which sig- 
nalizes her birth, nearly twenty centuries have 
passed; yet two-thirds of the whole earth's 
population are today without Christ, millions 
of them never having even heard His name. 
How many in your own neighborhood are in a 

184 



The Power in the Church 

like pitiable case? I have no doubt but that 
every one, if he so desires, can find a multitude 
of plausible reasons for the striking contrast 
between the first three centuries and the fol- 
lowing seventeen; but the fact remains that, 
during the former period, the Church con- 
ducted successfully a campaign of enormous 
proportions, and this, with comparatively no 
facilities within her reach; while, during the 
latter period, with every facility increasingly 
at hand, the Church militant wins only local 
victories, and in many parts of the field, barely 
holds her own. 

To my mind, there are two fundamental 
causes of this state of things: First, the dele- 
gation to certain chosen individuals among us, 
of the glorious opportunity provided for every 
one of us; secondly, the disregard of God, the 
Holy Ghost, as the sole motive power in our- 
selves and in the Church at large. Unless 
these two defects can be remedied, and until 
they are, the Church will remain sluggish and 
ineffectual, requiring to be prodded and goaded 
along the path of her high calling by "drives" 
and "campaigns" and devices of all sorts, which 
can do little more than galvanize her into a 
fleeting semblance of life. The Holy Spirit 
comes as a guest where He is invited ; He stays 
so long as the need of Him is recognized; He 
abides forever where He is forever welcomed; 
He leaves the dwelling where His presence is 
politely ignored. It may be mere coincidence, 

185 



The Church's Life 

it may be a hint of a profound truth, but in 
any case, it is worthy of note that the two 
Christian bodies w T hich have been the greatest 
missionary influences in the world, before and 
since the Reformation — the Roman Catholics 
and the Methodists — are also those which lay 
most stress upon the presence and office of the 
Holy Ghost. One would almost conclude that 
God is willing to overlook aberrations in mat- 
ters of faith and order within His Church, if 
only her members recognize the one Source of 
Power and draw upon Him eagerly for the 
accomplishment of His purpose in the world. 
For in things pertaining to faith and order, 
supremely important though they be, He can 
overrule man's errors; but in matters which 
involve man's will to see and to obey, He can 
do little so long as He leaves man the free 
agent which He has made Him. 

It is interesting to us Churchmen to recall 
that in the whole Book of Common Prayer 
there are but three prayers addressed directly 
to God the Holy Ghost: The Veni Creator 
Spirit us in the Ordinal ; the prayer beginning, 
"O God, Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faith- 
ful," in the rarely-heard Office of Institution 
of Ministers, and the brief address at the open- 
ing of the Litany. It is true that three days 
in the Church's year are devoted to the Holy 
Spirit, but how little is made of them! It is 
surely a hopeful sign that the proposal has 
recently been made to change the name of 

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The Power in the Church 

Whitsunday to Pentecost, and of Trinity Sun- 
day to "The First Sunday after Pentecost, 
commonly called Trinity Sunday/' and to num- 
ber the succeeding Sundays, not after Trinity, 
as at present, but after Pentecost. Should 
this change be effected, the mind of the Church 
will be directed, for half of the year, to the 
presence and work of God the Holy Ghost. 

A book which deservedly excited wide- 
spread interest a few years ago was Allen's 
Missionary Methods, St. Paul's or Ours. We 
are often so at our wits' ends to devise methods 
of stirring up the Church, and are, w 7 ithal, so 
obsessed with the idea that modern methods 
are the only practical ones, that we are apt 
to forget that the things of God are governed 
by different laws than those of man, and are 
not amenable to the same treatment. It is 
possible that the methods by which the Church 
was extended during the first century were 
better than those pursued in the twentieth. 
Anyhow, the results were so far superior, that 
both are worth considering as a possible case 
of cause and effect. Let us therefore compare 
the Church of the first century with that of 
the twentieth, in these respects. 

(i) In the first place, as we have already 
seen, most Christians were, in those early days, 
tremendously conscious of the new life into 
which they had been born, and they were cor- 
respondingly eager to transmit it without de- 
lay. They went far and fast. Much of their 

187 



The Church's Life 

most important work is unknown and unre- 
corded. There were Christians in Damascus 
before Saul of Tarsus arrived there; he was 
the first of the Apostles to reach Rome, yet 
he found the Church already there ; in Britain 
and Gaul there were Churches long before we 
have any record of a mission to those countries. 
Who founded these Churches ? No one knows 
with certainty; we can only conjecture that the 
zeal of some humble disciples knew no limits. 
No religious activity in modern times is com- 
parable with this, except that of the Moham- 
medan. He prays without ceasing; he is a 
propagandist everywhere and always. 

(2) Then there was the constant telling of 
the good news by those to whom it meant 
everything. Today we hire certain people to 
preach to us, and occasionally send some one 
on our behalf to preach to others at a distance; 
but among ourselves Jesus Christ is a person 
to be spoken of only with bated breath, and 
our experiences of Him only in the strictest 
moderation and privacy. A dumb spirit seems 
to possess us — the kind of spirit which our 
Lord drove out of people. The "Gift of 
tongues" was, at the outset, a powerful help 
and witness, but surely less so than the in- 
numerable translations of the Bible into nearly 
every tongue known to man today, and the 
increasing preponderance of certain languages 
the world over. The difficulties of a confusion 
of tongues, such as rendered extraordinary 

188 



The Power in the Church 

measures necessary, are almost done away 
with today. An American can preach to a 
Chinese through the proxy of the printed page. 

(3) Undoubtedly absolute unity of purpose 
and organization within the early Church 
helped her incalculably. At least, this unity 
gave to the Holy Spirit an opportunity to be 
heard. The Body of Christ today is torn into 
innumerable fragments; unity of aim is prac- 
tically lacking, unity of organization largely 
so. Not since the ninth century has the voice 
of the Spirit been heard in a united Church; 
amid the babel of modern sects it is hopeless 
to expect Him to be heard intelligibly. With 
all its good results, the Reformation opened 
the way for further division. Congregation- 
alism arose in 1568 as a schism, from the 
Church of England ; the Presbyterians became 
a separate body a generation later; then fol- 
lowed the Baptists in 1633, and the Methodists 
in 1784. Since then, the divisions have sub- 
divided and the process has been fast and 
furious. Even the three great divisions which 
have retained the Faith and Order of the prim- 
itive Church are at odds between themselves. 
Not until the whole Church is once more at 
unity within herself will the authoritative 
voice of the Holy Spirit be again heard in full 
measure and unmistakably. 

(4) The great bond of union in the early 
Church was the Holy Communion, duly ad- 
ministered and rightly received at least once 

189 



The Church's Life 

a week. By this, the members of the Church 
were made one body in Christ, and acted as 
one body with manifold functions. They were 
baptized into life, endued with the Holy Ghost 
through the laying on of apostolic hands, fed 
by Christ with His body and blood. How 
could they have been other than a mighty body ? 
With good reason has the Church always asso- 
ciated Baptism and Confirmation and the Holy 
Communion as steps in a continuous process; 
for the life received in Baptism is empowered 
by the Holy Ghost in Confirmation and main- 
tained by ever-renewed union with the living 
Christ in His blessed Sacrament. 

To speak of a baptized person's "joining 
the Church" in later life is to misunderstand 
the meaning and effect of Baptism. It is true 
that at Confirmation the baptismal vows are 
personally reaffirmed, but the essence of the 
rite is the gift of the Holy Ghost through the 
laying on of hands by the Bishop, that so the 
confirmed person may have grace and power 
to keep his vows. Then follows the Holy Com- 
munion through which he is kept in union with 
Jesus Christ. All three are steps in the normal 
development of the child of God, from his birth 
into the Family, until he attains "unto a full- 
grown man, unto the measure of the stature 
of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). In- 
deed, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Bap- 
tism is immediately followed by the rite which 
corresponds to Confirmation, the latter being 

190 



The Power in the Church 

properly regarded as the completion of the 
former. 

As yet no lesser forms of common worship 
had developed. For many years the Jewish 
Christians maintained their connection with 
the synagogue, and joined in the Sabbath ob- 
servances; and it was only very much later, 
when the Christian Church had finally parted 
with Judaism and had established its own dis- 
tinctive places for Christian worship, that 
there developed also distinctive forms of Chris- 
tian worship other than the Eucharist. These 
originated as informal meetings for prayer, 
largely composed of devout women, held either 
in private houses or in the churches. The 
leadership of these meetings gradually passed 
into the hands of the clergy, and with the rise 
of monasticism, the prayers and reading of 
psalms, etc., became crystallized into the form 
of definite offices which, with certain variations 
in different localities and with general conden- 
sation, were used daily in the monastic estab- 
lishments at certain fixed hours : Matins (mid- 
night), Lauds (sunrise), Prime (6 a. m.), 
Terce (9 a. m.), Sext (noon), None (3 p. m.), 
Vespers (sunset), and Compline (9 p. m.). 
This was the basis of the Roman Breviary, 
and it was selected portions of the latter which 
were used in compiling the Daily Offices 
(Morning and Evening Prayer) in the Book 
of Common Prayer. 

Meantime the Sunday worship, connected 
191 



The Church's Life 

exclusively with the Holy Communion, also 
became crystallized into definite form, and was 
known as the Liturgy. The precise form 
which the Liturgy took varied somewhat in 
different localities, so that scholars today rec- 
ognize six main groups of ancient liturgies, 
four Eastern in origin and use, two Western. 
The latter (the Roman and the Gallican), re- 
vised and combined in the eleventh century by 
the Bishop of Salisbury, w T as known as the 
Sarum (Salisbury) Use, and is practically the 
Liturgy as contained in the Book of Common 
Prayer. The origin of the other portions of 
the Prayer-book is a less important matter. 
The interesting point is that not only have the 
Daily Offices of the monks come to be regarded 
by us as the proper Services for Sundays, but, 
rather generally, they have been allowed to 
supplant the Service which, in the early Church, 
was regarded as the special glory of the Lord's 
Day; with the indirect result that many lay 
people prepare themselves and are content to 
receive the Holy Communion only once a 
month, or possibly only once a year. I am not 
arguing either one way or the other ; but it is 
surely important for us to note that, on the 
one hand, the early Church — which was, in all 
her members, a mighty missionary witness and 
force — did lay great stress upon the Holy Com- 
munion as the Sacrament of the union of her 
members in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; 
and, on the other hand, that the modern Church 

192 



The Power in the Church 

tends to substitute other forms of Sunday wor- 
ship and fellowship, and is a disrupted and in- 
effective missionary witness and power, espe- 
cially when working under conditions which 
demand primarily the welding, teaching and 
witnessing power of the Holy Ghost, i. e., in 
the foreign field. 

(5) That "miracles" of healing were a con- 
stant witness to the power of Christ in the 
early Church, and that they played an impor- 
tant part in her missionary effectiveness can 
not be questioned. That they occupy no such 
position in the Church at large today is equally 
evident. Either Jesus Christ is dead, or He 
has lost His power, or men have lost their 
faith in Him, or God has substituted some 
other healing agency. We have discussed this 
matter in a previous chapter ; it is only neces- 
sary, therefore, to add that while the great 
advance in knowledge regarding the human 
body, and in medical and surgical skill, is un- 
questionably according to the purpose of God, 
yet the practice of healing based on this can 
be regarded only as a supplementary means. 
It is foolish to argue that God has delegated 
His healing power to agents who generally dis- 
regard lis cooperation. This would be most 
unlike Him. When the medical profession 
comes universally to believe in and to seek the 
action of God, through His chosen agents, and 
when it recognizes all material means of heal- 
ing as merely supplementary to that action and 

193 



The Church's Life 

in their nature sacramental, it will then be time 
to argue that "miracles" of healing are no 
longer necessary as a testimony to our Lord's 
power. But when that time comes, such works 
will no longer appear "miraculous," since they 
will be recognized as the normal action of our 
blessed Lord in and through His Church. This 
is a missionary method in respect to which the 
modern Church has deviated enormously from 
primitive practice. 

Such seem to me the principal methods ap- 
plied of old by the Church in the fulfillment of 
her mission in the world. It may be that we 
shall find, in our own deviation from, or 
abandonment of, them, a cause of the Church's 
present comparative lack of success. 

There are features of the early Church 
which have a further bearing on this matter, 
but which may be reviewed more hurriedly, 
either because they are duplicated today, or 
because they were evidently consequent upon 
more important features. 

(6) The association with the Apostles of 
other duly ordained men, thus forming a three- 
fold ministry of a sacramental nature for the 
transmission of sacramental grace, was a 
prominent mark of the early undivided Church, 
and continues today to distinguish those com- 
munions which, together, embrace by far the 
largest proportion of Christians. These are 
the Roman, the Greek and the Anglican 
Churches. The case is somewhat analogous 

194 



The Power in the Church 

to a national army which consists of regular 
troops with officers trained and commissioned 
under the auspices of the Government, but 
which may be supplemented by irregular troops 
of various degrees of training and under dis- 
cipline variously administered. These irregu- 
lar troops may do admirable service; under 
certain conditions they may be more effective 
than the regulars; and they certainly fight in 
the same cause and under the same oath of 
allegiance. They are parts of the army, but 
not of the regular army, that is, of an army 
permanently organized according to duly au- 
thorized and established usage and discipline. 
(7) In the early Church, efficiency was also 
obtained by apportioning among the members 
various kinds of work to be done according to 
the ability of each (see Acts 2:42; 1 Cor. 
12:8-11, 28-29; Eph. 4:11-12). We have de- 
parted far from this ideal. The third order of 
the ministry has, in the Anglican communion, 
become practically limited to those few who 
find in it merely a necessary stepping-stone to 
the priesthood ; the perpetual diaconate is tend- 
ing to become a grace descending in the female 
line only. The rector of a parish is supposed 
to be at once a priest, a preacher, a pastor, a 
parish visitor, a teacher, and a financial man- 
ager ; while, meantime, there lies at hand inert, 
unaroused and unused, a vast accumulation of 
lay energy which the few existing organiza- 
tions barely touch. 

195 



The Church's Life 

(8) As rapidly as the Gospel entered new 
fields and won adherents, the latter were at 
once organized into autonomous Churches (not 
"denominations"), each in active union with 
the Church at large through their local Bishops, 
and bound together by sacramental ties. Pres- 
ently these Churches became themselves cen- 
ters of missionary activity, and so the Church 
grew in orderly fashion, and the voice of the 
Holy Spirit could be heard in her councils. 
It would seem that only as the whole Church 
Catholic — "the blessed company of all faithful 
people" — wills to return to the Faith and Order 
of primitive times, can she recover her mis- 
sionary zeal and duplicate her early victories. 

(9) Among the Churches so organized, the 
Apostles and their companions made frequent 
visitations; often letters had to take the place 
of visits, but into these letters the Apostles 
poured their souls, directing, admonishing, 
praising, warning, encouraging, threatening. 
Surely much more might be made today of 
epistles addressed by our Bishops to groups 
of Churches of whom God has made them over- 
seers. 

(10) Finally, the method of the early 
Church was for every member to contribute 
money liberally and gladly in order that the 
Word of God might be free to spread through- 
out the world. They prayed for and cultivated 
this grace; therefore they gave to the utmost 
limit of their ability and beyond it, placing no 

196 



The Power in the Church 

petty obligation of tithing as their bounds. 
They gave spontaneously, cheerfully deliber- 
ately. They rivalled one another in their giv- 
ing; money given appeared a safe investment; 
it was an expression of their unbounded grati- 
tude as the redeemed of the Lord — sacramental 
indeed — the outward and visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace. And they thus 
gave because they first gave their own selves 
unto the Lord" (see n Cor. 8 and 9). A com- 
parison between early and modern practice in 
this regard is tragic. 



So we bring to a close our study of the great- 
est cause on earth — the mission of God's 
Church. We have tried to see in it the pas- 
sionate longing of God's heart for the sons of 
men. We have considered the appealing mes- 
sage, and the all-sufficient power of it. We 
have seen the Christ stand watching in pity 
the desperate needs of mankind, and in active 
mercy satisfying those needs through the 
power of His own abundant life. We have 
followed His beloved community as it set 
forth, in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, to 
fulfill its divine mission of embodying the 
Blessed One, perpetuating His life on earth, 
bearing His sacramental grace to every hungry 
and thirsty soul, and baptizing the nations into 
the Family of God. We have seen the results 
attending that mission; and we have noted 

197 



The Church's Life 

carefully the methods pursued, in order that 
we might see wherein our own are defective. 
It will be of the utmost value if we have come 
to see clearly that the objective of the Church's 
Mission is to give to every man, woman and 
child in this fair land of ours an opportunity 
to share in a more abundant life for body, 
mind and soul; and, further, to establish in 
every land and among all peoples an organized, 
autonomous, self-supporting and missionary 
branch of God's One Holy, Catholic and Apos- 
tolic Church. To this end God calls us "to 
present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, 
acceptable to God, which is our reasonable 
service; . . . that we may prove what is the 
good and acceptable and perfect will of God" 
(Rom. 12:1, 2). 



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